In Perpetrator & Victim, photographer Mike Stone confronts the uneasy entanglement between the machinery of Nazi persecution and the materials still embedded in contemporary image-making. Working with a 1938 Leica IIIa and period lenses whose industrial lineage runs through Nazi-era Germany, he uses cameras, film, chemistry, and paper deliberately drawn from that history to make portraits of survivors. The work asks what it means when tools once folded into a system of exploitation are turned, with consent, toward recording the faces of those that system tried to erase.

Made in quiet, conversational sessions in people’s homes, the portraits draw on the traditions of Erich Salomon’s unobtrusive documentation and August Sander’s unsentimental typologies. Alongside the Perpetrator & Victim prints, Stone will discuss his four-decade relationship with Leica cameras and Agfa materials and illustrate his methodology by showing related survivor portraits made around a commission responding to the Wannsee Conference.

Rather than smoothing Leica’s contradictory wartime record or the histories of companies such as Agfa, ORWO, and Hahnemühle into a comforting narrative, the project keeps those tensions visible in the images themselves. This evening, Stone invites viewers to handle the prints, to feel their physical weight, and to consider their own responsibility when the materials of culture and the materials of persecution turn out to be the same.

This event offers a rare opportunity not only to hear the stories behind the work, but to handle a working portfolio of prints that brings the material history of the images into the room, including survivor portraits never previously exhibited.

Note for Special Exhibition

During the event, a portfolio of survivor portraits made with period and modern Leica equipment, including work never previously exhibited, will be available for visitors to hold and examine, inviting a physical, tactile encounter with each print that no book or image behind glass can match.

About the speaker

Mike Stone is a photographer and educator specialising in portraiture and long-form documentary projects. Over four decades he has created work for charities, arts organisations and businesses, alongside independent series exploring the Irish Traveller community, British Jewish veterans of the Second World War, and is currently documenting a Scottish drug and alcohol recovery community.

Stone is founder of The Reminiscences Project, a publication for portraits and interviews that foreground testimony and lived experience. He teaches creative media and develops curriculum in further education, integrating photographic history, ethics and practice into his work with emerging image-makers.

Description supplied by the event organiser.