Odd Sympathy – Benjamin Jones in Conversation with Alexander Mourant
The following is an edited version of a conversation held between Benjamin Jones and Alexander Mourant on the occasion of Jones’ solo exhibition Odd Sympathy at Santi, London, from 21st June to 18th July 2026.
Alexander Mourant: Should we start with the curation. Having been to your studio, I know you have an abundance of works and you’re a prolific maker. What’s the process that led to this exhibition?
Benjamin Jones: I think any exhibition is a collaboration. One of the first groups of work that Santi Steib (Gallery Founder, Santi) gravitated to when he came to the studio was the museum photographs: the fossils, taxidermies, museological objects. These became central to our conversations and the cornerstone of the show. We then introduced the series of large process-based abstract pictures, Surface Tension (2024). These provided two kinds of ‘edges’ to the exhibition, with the remaining pictures from the outside world. So, we had three groups of images: process-based abstractions, museum objects, and found natural forms; a breadth based on the linkages between them and how they in different ways draw one’s attention back to the conditions of the medium. They resonate with one another; an example is Ice Flow, Lake District 2023/24 having a very formal relationship with the shape of the chemical traces in Speak but Conceal the Speaker (2023/26).
This visual similarity between the two leads the viewer to realise they’re both about liquidity. One is a form traced by chemistry, flowing over a sheet of photographic paper in the darkroom, creating an image by chance; the form just where it effectively trickles. And Ice Flow, Lake District 2023/24 is made by water thawing and freezing, running down steps on a mountain top. And so it’s these links which are occurring on multiple levels, which are about the materials of photography, as well as being kind of bound together visually.
I’m interested in photographs that make you perceive the thing differently to its reality.
In the main gallery, on the back wall, there’s a picture of a hundred million year old ammonite shell next to this little museum display of monarch butterflies. The logic of that, to make another example, came out of the contrasting scales of time they represent; one, deep geological time, the other, this representation of a fleeting life.
AM: You’re actively asking viewers to shift through different registers of time and how the photograph can help us access varying depths of time.
BJ: Yes, and drawing attention back to the medium itself; how it’s translating and changing what you’re seeing because it’s a photograph. If you take the emu’s legs for example; when you see the taxidermy in real life, it’s got the stance which is meant to make it feel alive, but it’s very obviously stuffed. When you see it as an image, suddenly you’ve got this idea that it’s been caught in mid-motion. One presumes the photograph is what’s frozen this motion, not that it’s inherently still. Then you see the block under a foot, the pin supporting a leg, like the ‘Easter eggs’ in a video game, revealing the constructed nature of the scene, the mode of display, and how your sense of time shifts.
left: Ice Flow, Lake District 2023/24; right: 100 Million Years 2025/26
I’m interested in photographs that make you perceive the thing differently to its reality. The mountainside becomes ambiguous, reading as cloud or sea perhaps, but is fundamentally about visibility and atmospherics. I don’t mean in terms of mood, I mean in terms of weather. I think there’s always this question of what changes when something becomes a photograph.
AM: There’s this dialogue between something that’s been preserved or stilled and something that’s active in the world. And I think spatially the way we encounter the prints (they curve and bend, they’re not forced down) heightens our physical relationship to them as objects. The frames themselves are handmade and tactile. The abstract works are especially fluid, pushing us towards the photograph not being still.
BJ: Definitely. I think it’s also part of the logic of making just one of each. I’ve always been really interested in that encounter with the photograph as an object. Part of the logic of displaying them in this way is that it embraces sculptural quality of the paper; displaying them in these handmade box frames proposes them as artefacts or specimens. It’s about giving that sense of the photograph’s materiality as an object, as more than its image.
I guess it’s also to do with that experiential quality, pursued through constant experimentation with process: there are multiple cameras, film formats and printing scales. The large abstractions for example are printed defocused, so there’s no grain or sharp edges. There are big tonal expanses and the experience of looking at them is what’s foregrounded; you’re trying to focus on something which is almost indeterminate, which is, you know, not sharp or granular. They are an attempt to heighten that experience of encountering a photograph as an object, rather than just thinking, okay, well, the information is in the image and that’s what I need, because then it’s endlessly transmittable.
Surface Tension #4 (left) Surface Tension #3 (right)
AM: The works all propose different logics for how images can be made. Some point us to fossilisation, geology and deep time, whereas the abstract works are so minimal, we question how an image even comes onto a page. They look like either early studies or the discovery of an ancient image. The abstract works give the impression of attempting to get an image in focus in a camera obscura, or that we’re in a cave with a shaft of light and we’re trying to sketch something onto a wall – they have an ethereal quality of an image in becoming.
The works all propose different logics for how images can be made.
BJ: Printing these, I was always holding back as much density as possible, to elicit a sense of something either fading away or coming into being, very much indeterminate and inviting speculation. That’s part of the logic of their hanging next to Mountainside, Lake District (2023/26); that idea of obscured vision or blindness, what is omitted rather than what is described, but also how this stripping back necessitates a searching for the familiar. A friend came to see them in the studio, describing them as apparitions on the paper; I liked this idea of something that is emerging but hard to place.
AM: It’s sort of like you’re tempting us with how far you’ll let go.
BJ: Yes and, in doing so, foregrounding not ‘a subject’ but that whole experience of perception and interpretation.
AM: They remind me of Claudio Parmiggiani, the Italian artist who does smoke works, famous for setting fires and creating negative/positive imprints on canvas.
BJ: I suppose that Parmiggiani’s works and these present an incredibly light touch; a trace of their original subject that has atrophied most of its information and so is rather more like a spectre. That reduction of clarity and information is really essential in both circumstances.
AM: Is that why you’re rejecting colour?
Looking Right, Mountainside 2022/26 (left); installation view, Santi, 2026 (right)
BJ: I’m not working in colour primarily because of that level of abstraction that you achieve with even representational black and white images. It’s translated into a symbol or faint etching of itself as opposed to the illusion of reality’s presence set up by colour. That’s always been interesting to me. It’s maybe also more to do with language and poetics than the documentary; the world is that much more at arm’s length and so demands more imaginative input from a viewer.
AM: There are movements between micro and macro. The shifting of scales, both in terms of ‘time’ we access through the images, and your play with representation: a mountainscape dissolving into pure abstraction. You’re working our senses.
BJ: Making any photograph into a print of course involves wrestling with this. Do you mirror, enlarge or shrink reality? The abstractions are photographic enlargements of 16×12” prints and so the marks made at that smaller scale are hugely magnified. Nettles, Austrian Slovenian Border 2019/23 again is vastly larger than life whereas Copy of a Copy (Archaeopteryx) 2025/25 is near 1:1. In all cases photography is subjectively translating these subjects, with decisions around scale essential to how the picture unfolds, bringing them deceptively closer to reality, or creating a layered unfamiliarity. The shifts in time are also important to the show, with the fossils presenting a subject that refers to slow, deep, geological time, whilst others such as the Ice Flow, Lake District 2022/23 are more to do with seasonality, the butterflies a fleeting, ephemeral lifespan. They function in a way as different resolutions of time.
AM: I enjoy thinking of them as resolutions. The way you print lends them a graphite quality, some even look like drawings. I’m thinking of Vija Celmins’ highly detailed pencil drawings of seascapes and spider webs. There’s a kinship between duration and labour in the making of photo-realistic drawing and darkroom practice, and an illusionistic event that occurs when viewing such works (as we move closer and further away) that influences our perception of representation. I also imagine them as sketches by scientists.
Copy of a Copy (Archaeopteryx) 2025/25
BJ: And of course with both mediums there’s a granular quality to the material making up the image, in the photograph the physical resolution being determined by film size/speed and enlargement. That illusionistic event you describe is technically defined by this; the point where an image breaks down into, in the case of drawings, graphite; in photographs, silver grain. Decisions about those parameters determine at what point the image gives way to material, something I’m really interested in, and which permits or restricts access to information about a picture’s subject. It’s for this reason that I’m working across all these different formats and scales, it determines how tenuous that link to the subject is, how much illusion or speculation is generated. A grainy representation of a museum diorama can generate a greater sense of reality than the physical diorama itself, precisely by reducing the resolution. In other cases one of course wants to describe as much of a surface as possible. In Celmins’ work that balance of how much information a surface holds is so important, and many of her series are of course uniform surfaces that shift between illusion and breakdown. The importance of erasure in her work, the labour that entails, is also an interesting consideration in relation to darkroom practice. This idea of making and unmaking/discarding, doing and redoing; printing strongly echoes that. Each iteration of a print is an attempt to see the photograph differently, to refine that view towards an ideal that means something to you in that moment. This of course changes over time, which is why I like also to return to the same negative sometimes years later.
Each iteration of a print is an attempt to see the photograph differently, to refine that view towards an ideal that means something to you in that moment.
I thought it was interesting that you described these as being like drawings that a scientist would make. It brings into question that tension between perceived objectivity and subjectivity. A scientist looks for an objective rendering of something which directly describes appearance. I’m also interested in how the conditions of display are orchestrated so as to heighten the pathos in the specimens. These are all from public museums, and I think the reason those butterflies get arranged as if flying in this cluster is so as to create this little sense of wonder, which is of no use to science, but which is very much of use in making the encounter more memorable for a museum visitor. Nature is presented as an image of itself, through a slightly magical reanimation that’s halfway between science and entertainment.
AM: Do you think all the works feel melancholic?
BJ: On varying levels, though it’s not always dominant. Zebras 2026/26 is one that comes to mind when you say that, though it’s complicated by the animal’s beauty. There is also humour in some of them, Shoal 2025/26 (1.1) and Towards 2026/26 for example.
AM: Well, your title is Odd Sympathy.
BJ: Have you heard that term before? In 1665, Christiaan Huygens, who invented the pendulum clock, hung two such clocks on a wooden beam and they fell into anti-phase synchronicity with one another, swinging opposite directions in-sympathy. In a letter to a colleague, he described them as being in odd sympathy with one another. I didn’t want to drill this down as some very specific metaphor for any particular work, but I like how it refers more generally to the relationship between the photograph and reality, the staging of it and how it’s so close to the thing but decisively not. I think this is why it’s fundamentally different to painting; there’s that direct indexical link; a material, causal link all the way back to a subject which it has in some sense touched. It is very much of the thing that it represents. So there is this sympathetic relationship to reality, but a jarring separation from it as well.
Zebras 2026/26 (left); Towards 2026/26 (right)
AM: I almost don’t want to ask this question, but as there’s a strong meditation on time, particularly the past, and as the abstract works are more speculative, how does the show consider or position the future?
BJ: The abstract works are intended to heighten and foreground the physical encounter. They largely obscure their point of origin and also don’t have a reference point outside of the studio and photographic materiality. What’s interesting for me is the experience that they create perceptually in the present. The defocussed, blurred forms lack a defined edge and confuse a true sense of depth; the experience of looking in the present tense becomes the subject. It’s a different question in relation to the museum photographs. I’ve thought about them more from a photographic perspective than an environmental one, but what’s significant is primarily the conditions of display that raise questions about our relationship to the natural world as-image and how we compartmentalise it. Take the taxidermy as an example. All of these animals are removed from the ecosystems that, evolutionarily, made them what they are. There’s a reason the zebra has stripes. There’s a reason that the monarch butterflies have those markings and the emu those long legs. They’re all products of their environmental conditions. And so I think that to see them in these minimal spaces is significant; all very shallowly focused, which is technically necessitated by the lighting conditions. The result is these ambiguous, minimal stagings, which are very much not the ecosystems in which they evolved. And so to answer your question on futures, I think they raise the question of how we might avoid this compartmentalisation and understand the natural world as inherently relational.
AM: I don’t know how active it is in your intentions, but it feels as if there is a fundamental question of the representation of nature historically, and you’re seeking to disrupt that?
BJ: On some level. My work is not research oriented, but it’s absolutely informed by a curiosity around these subjects. I’ve never set out to make this work about this specific subject matter from a narrative standpoint. But I’m interested in contemporary research on mycology, the interconnection of trees and forests; the botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, for example, writes about indigenous Americans’ reciprocal and relational knowledge of the landscape whilst identifying commonalities and distinctions from Western science; how they can inform one another rather than function hierarchically. Learning about these subjects changes how one perceives the world and therefore changes the work that one makes, maybe gradually, subtly, by shifting the way one sees or what one looks at. And so I never want to make a direct causal link as I think it’s always happening gradually.
One thing often generates the next; approaching the work from this perspective means that there is no final or defining version; photographic processes always offer another possible reinterpretation. This is what the medium does fundamentally; reinterpretation via a chosen set of chosen technological parameters which can always be redefined to proffer something new.
Odd Sympathy continues at Santi, London 96 Robert Street, London NW1 3QP, to 18th July 2026.
