Thursday 24th – Saturday 26th September 2026
Dr Mike Hallett is a career academic, professional photographer and internationally published photo historian.
Curated by Emily Kennedy, the exhibition celebrates seven decades since Mike Hallett went to art college as a very naive sixteen-year-old to learn commercial art & photography at the Bournemouth Municipal College of Art. The exhibition storyline is enhanced with eight small books.
Mike Hallett considers these seven decades: 1956-1965 are my apprenticeship years and includes a student portfolio, tanks embarking for Suez in 1956, the ‘Ban the Bomb’ March in Trafalgar Square in 1960, and colour photographs from a Kodak Colour Scholarship in 1964 tenable in Rochester, NY, USA.
1966-1975 shows the American influence highlighting by being headhunted back to Rochester Institute of Technology in 1969 as Visiting Professor in Photographic Illustration. Rochester was the centre of the photographic universe at that time and my experiences still reflect that today.
1976-1985 is where ‘academia took over’, with black & white contact prints from a 10 by 8 inch Sinar camera in the late ‘70s, leading to my inspiration of the ‘Malvern Hills’ exhibited in 1986 -1995 saw my output in both pictures & words fundamentally change. Interviews with photojournalists and pictures of them for the photographic press became a learning curve before my conversations and biography with Stefan Lorant a decade later.
1996 -2005 we moved into the digital age with photo constructions providing exhibitions and publications on Birmingham’s Bull Ring in 2003 and Seaside in 2006. 2006-2015 expanded during photo constructions culminated with the Jurassic Coast publication for the 2012 London Olympics.
2016-2026 provided inconsequential images. This is the decade where storytelling took on a myriad of opportunities with the image both inside and outside the picture frame.
Additionally there are exhibits by Zki (Rory J Pszenitzki) and the Digibox Camera Club who we’ve worked with over many years.
The exhibition is at the iconic Victorian refurbished railway arches at Arches 28, Worcester (opposite The Hive) on Thursday 24, Friday 25 & Saturday 26 September 2026. A short walk from Worcester (Foregate Street) station, the exhibition is open between 10.30 and 18.00 hours each day, and there are additional events including a 20-minute ‘artist’s talk’ between 11.30 and 11.50.
For further media information, interviews and pictures please contact Mike Hallett at hallettpic@gmail.com