HIDDEN

Date: June 2025
Exhibition/Show Type: Solo
Media: Photography

Exhibition Description

Red Saunders’ epic photographic tableaux vivants (‘living pictures’) recreate momentous but overlooked events from Britain’s struggle for democracy and equality.

Hidden is a major photographic project by Red Saunders commissioned by Impressions Gallery and The Culture Company.

To view hi-res on-line images please go here

The Exhibition Guide to the original Hidden show is here

a video about the making of some Hidden images is here

a video about the making of one Hidden image is here

Hidden has been exhibited in several places, the show at The Cut is among many other national venues.

Focussing on the contributions of ordinary men and women, rather than the monarchs and ‘Great Men’ that dominate official history, Saunders seeks to shed light on the parallel, ‘hidden history’ of revolutionaries and radicals. Meticulously detailed, atmospherically lit, and historically accurate, each scene is recreated and posed by models, providing photographic ‘evidence’ for events that occurred before the widespread adoption of camera technology.

The exhibition shines photographic light on great moments in the long struggle of working people for democracy and social justice. The aim of the project, through re-imagining those events, is to reproduce important historical scenes involving the dissenters, radicals, revolutionaries, and non-conformists who have so often been hidden from the very history they made. It covers such subjects as the Peasants’ Revolt (1381), the Women Levellers’ Movement (1647), the Swing Riots (1830), the London Chartists (1842), the Peterloo Massacre (1819), the Great Derby Lockout (1833-4), and Sikh RAF volunteers in World War Two.
Each scene is carefully planned and lit, using local community enactors. To create these amazing images, Saunders has brought together the talents of a wide range of professionals and craftspeople, alongside an enthusiastic cast of volunteers who share his vision. Despite their complexity and epic scale, no ‘artificial intelligence’ or CGI (computer-generated imagery) has been used in creating the works in The Hidden Project.
Generally speaking, The Hidden Project’s subject matter ends with the invention of photography in the 1840s.

Red Saunders is an artist/photographer who combines his photographic practice with cultural, musical, and political activism.

“My tableaux only work because of the enthusiasm of my supporters both crew and cast and production teams. We struggle with institutional funding so rarely have a proper budget, so we need people who share my dreams to join with us in manifesting these ideas. We use techniques of the tableaux much the same as they did 150 yrs ago, save today we have the digital tools of the Mac and photoshop, which also enable us to shoot ambitious ideas on a tight budget.  We do not use CGI [computer generated Imagery] or AI , everything you see we photograph .The Hidden Project ends where photography began .”

The exhibition shines photographic light on great moments in the long struggle of working people for democracy and social justice.

The aim of the project, through re-imagining those events, is to reproduce important historical scenes involving the dissenters, radicals, revolutionaries, and non-conformists who have so often been hidden from the very history they made. It covers such subjects as the Peasants’ Revolt (1381), the Women Levellers’ Movement (1647), the Swing Riots (1830), the London Chartists (1842), the Peterloo Massacre (1819), the Great Derby Lockout (1833-4), and Sikh RAF volunteers in World War Two.

Generally speaking, The Hidden Project’s subject matter ends with the invention of photography in the 1840s.

‘Red Saunders work belongs to the long and honourable tradition of photo journalism that gives it its integrity authority and authenticity. But that tradition, and  Saunders’s work has been transformed by events, and by technology. With his plate camera, an object that would have looked at home on the battlefields of the American Civil War, he is as far from the world of YouTube digital image transmission as we are from horse drawn carriages. His work has become something else, with its patience, and its materiality, it has taken on a painterly quality. In spite of itself, it has become art.’
Dyan Sudjac, Director of the Design Museum London