In Northumberland, boxing photographer Pete Doherty reassembles a life altered by illness and loss.
After his father suffered a debilitating stroke and his mother was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer, Doherty tried desperately to hold on to what he had. He scrambled to photograph the transformation of the people he loved most in the world as they began to die. This continued until one day he woke up alone in his parents’ house, to a world irrevocably changed. Within a year of each other, both his parents had died, and he was left to move through a house, a town and a landscape that was suddenly foreign and dark.
To make sense of this new existence, he began to reassemble all the fragments of his life, inserting himself into the narrative in order to bring all the aspects together as a whole. He combined his boxing work with the images of his family, the town, and the landscape that they knew.
These sequences create an aesthetic that hopes to provoke questions and gestures of realignment (past/present/future). A series of images that depict being alive in a world where loved ones are suddenly gone.
After working for decades documenting the sport of boxing and its community, illness in his family caused photojournalist Pete Doherty to turn inward, focusing on the everyday people and places in his life. He seeks in his work to honour the beauty, the suffering, the resilience, and the sheer doggedness of the world around him.
Doherty has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions. His 2013 monograph, World’s Greatest, was published by Bulger Gallery Press, and his work has been featured in countless other publications. His photographs can be found in the Portrait Gallery of Canada, Wedge Curatorial Projects, and in many private collections. He currently lives and photographs in Toronto.
