About
Phoenix, 2010.
Simon Larbalestier (born 1962 in Pembrokeshire, UK) is a photographer who has been based in Bangkok, Thailand since 2001.Larbalestier is noted for his collaborative work with Vaughan Oliver and the design studios 23 Envelope and v23 providing the photography used on album artwork for bands such as Pixies, Red House Painters, Heidi Berry and other artists on the 4AD label. Much of the pair’s collaborative work features in the book Vaughan Oliver: Visceral Pleasures. His work includes images on many magazine covers for New Scientist and book covers for publishers Random House and Secker & Warburg featuring his distinctive collage style that he first developed at college.Graduating with a Masters of Art from the Royal College of Art, London in 1987, Larbalestier has described his final degree show as a turning point with some of the images becoming album artwork for the first Pixies EP Come On Pilgrim. Larbalestier went on to shoot images for all the Pixies albums notably Surfer Rosa, Doolittle and Bossanova providing a distinctive and influential imagery for the band. Larbalestier has had many solo and group exhibitions in Britain, Europe, Scandinavia and USA. His work during the 1990s and 2000s has moved through several landscape series in Italy, USA and Australia to several recent documentary series in Thailand, Cambodia and other areas of South East Asia.Larbalestier’s work is predominantly black and white with subsequent toning in the darkroom. More recently he has been producing digital images working with strong colour. He retains an interest in decayed textures and unusual juxtapositions of subject matter as well as “empty spaces, desolation and loneliness”. His recent documentary series shot in Angkor Wat and Siem Reap deals strongly with the human condition through portraits and atmospheric images of vacant rooms and landscapes and details of possessions revealing how people live.In 2009 Larbalestier and Oliver collaborated again on a limited edition box set re-issue of Pixies recordings, Minotaur, that included a 72 page book of new photography and graphics.In April 2010, Snap Galleries, Piccadilly, London housed a major retrospective of Larbalestier’s Pixies archive dating from 1986-2009. Larbalestier returned to Bangkok in May 2010 where he continues to reside. From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Larbalestier
