Michael
Grieve

Michael Grieve

biography

British photographer,  writer and teacher, lives between Athens (Greece) and Berlin (Germany)

Michael Grieve started out as a photographer for the music press in the 1980s before graduating with a Master’s degree in Photography from the University of Westminster in 1997.  Since 1998, he has been shooting reports and portraits for the press: first for The Independant until 2001, then as a freelance photographer for various titles of the European press (Weekend Guardian Magazine, Sunday Times Magazine, Telegraph Magazine, Le Monde, or Libération) until 2011.

At the same time Michael Grieve has documented political, social and daily life in England: riots, crime, the sex industry (No Love Lost), but also freeway and airport hotels (In Passing)… These personal works  are exhibited in Europe, notably at the Rencontres d’Arles (France) in 2008, at the Noorderlicht Festival (Netherlands) in 2009 and at the Fotofestiwal (Poland) in 2010.

During the 2010s, he explores new perspectives: he leaves London, develops a more auto-fictional photographic writing where  the sensibility defines meaning (The foreigner (sic) ), begins an activity of editor (1000 words) and teacher (Nottingham Trent University, Akademia Fotografii Warsawa, Technische Universität Berlin of Warsaw).

Founder and director Berlin Foto Kiez International Photography Workshops (2016), he teaches conceptual documentary since 2019 at the Ostkreuzschule für Fotografie (Berlin) and produces since 2013 articles and portrait photographs for The British Journal of Photography.

Series

London riots, 2011

Youth from the northeastern districts such as Tottenham and Hackney fight police forces in the UK capital. The shopkeepers and inhabitants fear the lootings..

Killing Kittens, 2009

Series | In less enlightened times the catholic church, in all its oppressive wisdom, propagated the myth that every time a woman gives herself sexual pleasure god kills a kitten.

Blue of Night, 2009

Series | The club is real but is a territory of sexual fiction where the lewd nakedness of bodies is shrouded in a dark light. On entering into the faded grandeur the mind registers a deafening anticipation of availability.

Means to the end : gun crime in London, 2008

Série | Despite the arrests and subsequent imprisonment of the Jamaican gangs, the Yardies, some years ago, gun crime in the UK has continued...

London Fashion Week, 2008

Series | A famous fashion designer once said that fashion exists to distract us from the reality of death. Here is a fragment of the life and backstage bustle of some of the London fashion shows captured by Michael Grieve.

No Love Lost, British sex Industry, 2008

Series | No Love Lost is a visual itinerary documenting people who use their sexuality as a commodity. The seemingly spiritually vacant environments of prostitution, pornography and stripping, invoke a sense of unfulfilled and dislocated lives.

London riots, 2011

Youth from the northeastern districts such as Tottenham and Hackney fight police forces in the UK capital. The shopkeepers and inhabitants fear the lootings..

Killing Kittens, 2009

Series | In less enlightened times the catholic church, in all its oppressive wisdom, propagated the myth that every time a woman gives herself sexual pleasure god kills a kitten.

Blue of Night, 2009

Series | The club is real but is a territory of sexual fiction where the lewd nakedness of bodies is shrouded in a dark light. On entering into the faded grandeur the mind registers a deafening anticipation of availability.

Means to the end : gun crime in London, 2008

Série | Despite the arrests and subsequent imprisonment of the Jamaican gangs, the Yardies, some years ago, gun crime in the UK has continued...

London Fashion Week, 2008

Series | A famous fashion designer once said that fashion exists to distract us from the reality of death. Here is a fragment of the life and backstage bustle of some of the London fashion shows captured by Michael Grieve.

No Love Lost, British sex Industry, 2008

Series | No Love Lost is a visual itinerary documenting people who use their sexuality as a commodity. The seemingly spiritually vacant environments of prostitution, pornography and stripping, invoke a sense of unfulfilled and dislocated lives.

London riots, 2011

Youth from the northeastern districts such as Tottenham and Hackney fight police forces in the UK capital. The shopkeepers and inhabitants fear the lootings..

Killing Kittens, 2009

Series | In less enlightened times the catholic church, in all its oppressive wisdom, propagated the myth that every time a woman gives herself sexual pleasure god kills a kitten.

Blue of Night, 2009

Series | The club is real but is a territory of sexual fiction where the lewd nakedness of bodies is shrouded in a dark light. On entering into the faded grandeur the mind registers a deafening anticipation of availability.

Means to the end : gun crime in London, 2008

Série | Despite the arrests and subsequent imprisonment of the Jamaican gangs, the Yardies, some years ago, gun crime in the UK has continued...

London Fashion Week, 2008

Series | A famous fashion designer once said that fashion exists to distract us from the reality of death. Here is a fragment of the life and backstage bustle of some of the London fashion shows captured by Michael Grieve.

No Love Lost, British sex Industry, 2008

Series | No Love Lost is a visual itinerary documenting people who use their sexuality as a commodity. The seemingly spiritually vacant environments of prostitution, pornography and stripping, invoke a sense of unfulfilled and dislocated lives.

Interviews

Michael Grieve talks to Alexander Strecker
Aldebaran
—
2018

Interview between photographer Michael Grieve and writer Alexander Strecker, who looks at Grieve’s background and the themes he addresses in his work. On the occasion of her project “The Foriegner [sic]” which was exhibited in the Float Gallery in Athens, Grieve presents her work in dialogue with Strecker. The event is called “The Inner Experience”.

Read

Michael Grieve, photographer
Karolina Spolniewski
—
2015

Photography workshop in Minsk with photographer Michael Grieve, Video by Karolina Spolniewski.