Some photos used in this blog post are courtesy of Soren Solkaer’s website as credited. Other images are exhibition photos by Dave Stuart
Street art photography is a modern phenomenon, millions of phone owners know nothing says “I’m edgy me” more than a selfie in front of a legal spraypainted mural. A much smaller number make street art photography their passion typically believing they perform some imaginary useful function documenting the ephemeral art and graffiti that appears on public walls. Few get to photograph street artists in action and almost none get to make the street artist the subject of the photograph. The exception is Soren Solkaer and finally after 10 years on tour the exhibition Surface, his collection of street artist portraits, has arrived in London.
Soren Solkaer emerged from teen years of skating and occasional tagging to become an art school trained portrait photographer, “I started with Amy Winehouse and Ronny Wood,” as you would. He turned his lens to street artists and pursued them all over the world to bag an hour or two of their time to stage portrait photos. This is no mean achievement in a culture where secrecy and anonymity is cherished.
The documenter is documented most revealingly in a “making of” film shining a light on the modus operendi through all stages of the quest from hunt to capture to post-processing.
Back in the day when there were not so many street art photographers and Instagram didn’t exist, exhibitions of street art photography were worth staging. Exhibition photographs were a bit better than the routine close cropped point-and-shoot Flickr uploads and the with limited lifespan of the art, most visitors would be seeing the photographed artworks for the first time. Sales however were non-existent and in the absence of a commercial upside the exhibitions were unfunded and rather ramshackle. How cheaply could you get 50 blown up prints on real paper; who’d give you a space Thursday to Sunday please, how cheaply could you frame them and as for lighting, no chance.
Surface benefits from proper staging, a proper exhibition space and proper lighting; the production values are basically off the scale compared to any other street art photography exhibition apart perhaps from Martha and Henry’s constantly reheated photos of classic New York 1980s subway graffiti.
20 years ago the street art photography orthodoxy was you had to capture the art on the wall exactly how it looked, as realistically as possible. Coming from the commercial world of glamour commissions which brooks no imperfections, Solkaer freed himself from that very limiting mindset. Post-processing, what we generally know as “photoshopping”, was used to boost the quality of the photos and the results are beautiful. The exhibition film reveals the use of a basic form of focus stacking to get an almost hyperreal depth of field, see in particular the moody close up of Borondo coupled with the sharpness of his brilliantly imaginative inverted and reflected image in the background.
In the accompanying project film Solkaer describes Borondo as being artistically interesting and there is no faulting his judgement there, in the period 2012 to 2014 when he was based in London Borondo laid down some of the most intelligent and painterly art ever to grace London’s streets. Solkaer takes the art as a starting point and uses that as both prop and inspiration to place the artist as an element within rather than merely adjacent to the art. Shrinking Slinkachu to scale in his own miniature street universe is genius though perversely it requires considerable stretching of the definition of “street artist” to include Slinkachu.
The core of the exhibition is a challenge, it says “reveal yourself” to a culture which rejoices in proclaiming presence and identity while preserving anonymity. I am my name and my name is all around you, yet you don’t know me. Many of the artists still instinctively revert to the mask, the hoodie and facing away from the camera as shyness prevails. No one photographed as part of the project has had their identity validated in a court of law using these photos.
If there is a trap that Solkaer wholeheartedly threw himself into it is the arrogance of curation, anointing his subjects as the crème-de-la-crème and therefore worthy of his attention means the exhibition is dominated by the usual rather subjective “top 100”. No worries, it’s the only basis on which this kind of art sells, not many are interested in photographs of one hit wonders who dropped one brilliant stencil only the girlfriend and two drinking buddies saw. Like every other photographer though, no chance of getting Banksy.
Solkaer’s mission ran from 2012 to 2014, the book was published in 2015 and as so many of the subjects are from London and photographed in London, why has the show taken so long to roll up on these shores? Soren told Graffoto that it was simply the wait to find a suitably large space In London. On the plus side the passage of time allows the show to function both as a memory of a culture’s bygone era and a Solkaer retrospective. Several of the subjects, notably Bast and Richard Hambleton are no longer with us. The Surface project created portraits of over 150 artists in its 3 year creation, close to half of which are present in this exhibition. Buy the book to see the rest, there’s a huge stack of them by the ticket desk.
The exhibition gives few insights Solkaer as a professional photographer over the project period though the clues are there if you mine a bit deeper. The 2011 Shepard Fairey photo is rather loose, the image is off centre when it really begs for symmetry and the background is basically a bit soft, then you compare that to the hyperrealism of the Borondo nighttime shot in London and the studio-esque quality of the London Police shot, though that may have owed a lot to the Miami sunshine.
The exhibition is on until March 2026, go and see it. If you plan to see the unauthorised Banksy exhibition next door perhaps it’s not too late to switch your tickets, Surface is the top layer.
SURFACE – Soren Solkaer
Oct 24 2025 – March 2026
Tickets: HERE
79 – 85 Old Brompton Road, SW7 3LD (Sussex Mansions)
This is the review that had been drafted on the Graffoto blog when overnight it ceased to function. Apologies for the long delay in getting back on track after that set back. Reviews will be on this blog temporarily until Graffoto (hopefully) rises from the ashes.
