School of Social & Political Sciences

The School of Social and Political Sciences welcomed Ukraine based artist and photographer Mark Neville to deliver a guest lecture to students on our Media, War and Security course.

Mark, who was born in Britain, works at the intersection of art and documentary, investigating the social function of photography. Since 2020, he has been living and working in Ukraine, and documenting the war with Russia and its impact on the lives of Ukrainian people and society.

Along with Tanya Logacheva, Mark is co-founder of Postcode Ukraine, which supports small charities and volunteer groups in Ukraine to deliver humanitarian aid where it is the most needed.

Often working with closely knit communities, in a collaborative process intended to be of direct, practical benefit to the subject, Mark’s photographic projects have frequently made the towns he portrays the primary audience for the work.

His socially engaged practice and targeted book projects have been the subject of numerous solo shows at venues including the V&A Museum, London, the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, and The Photographers’ Gallery, London. Neville has been living and working in Kyiv, Ukraine since 2020.

Mark’s work has been shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize, for the Arles Photo Book Award 2022, the Aperture Photobook of the Year Award in both 2022 and 2017, and for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2020. Neville's work exists in different forms in many public and private collections, including those of the Arts Council of England, Kunstmuseum Bern, National Galleries of Scotland, and the Scottish Parliament.

In 2011, Mark spent three months working on the front line in Helmand, Afghanistan, with 16 Air Assault Brigade as an official war artist. The films and photographs he made there featured in a major solo show at The Imperial War Museum London in the Summer of 2014. More recently his war experience has resulted in The Battle Against Stigma Book Project, a collaboration between the artist and Jamie Hacker Hughes. The project challenged the stigma of mental health problems in the military and aimed to encourage attitude change in order to facilitate help seeking at an early stage, without people being stigmatised.

Mark has been working closely with the School’s Professor Andrew Hoskins, who he met during his work in Afghanistan, on Forgetting War, a project exploring the parallel reality presented by the media of war.

Media, War & Security is a course offered by the School on our MSc Media, Culture & Society programme. The School is home to several academics doing valuable work on the war on Ukraine. 

Watch our interview with Mark Neville.

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First published: 3 February 2023