ROAD MAP







TYGER TYGER - BENJAMIN BUTCHER                                                                                                                                                
Tyger Tyger is an expansive noir that moves between documentary and fiction. Butcher uses the city of London to construct an austere, imagined metropolis in which its metallic facades loom over a largely depopulated landscape. The figures who emerge within this landscape remain defiant in protest, grief-stricken and solatary.

The work was conceived after Butcher relocated to London in 2019, during a period of dramatic social and political change. Britain was undergoing its separation from the European Union, the global pandemic had transformed everyday life, the Black Lives Matter movement prompted a global reckoning and the pressures of climate change were becoming increasingly undeniable.

The title is drawn from William Blake’s poem The Tyger (1794), which ruminates on the duality of beauty and destruction. Butcher’s photographs, like Blake’s verses, pose open-ended questions, inviting viewers to reflect on broader realities shaped by imbalances of power, human fragility and the natural world’s enduring presence in an era of ecological instability.




   
First edition, 250 copies.
124 pages, 300mm x 200mm, 67 individual black and white plates, threadsewn,
Swiss-bound, landscape softcover, silkscreen cover.  ISBN: 978-1-3999-9782-9
Stockists
Dashwood Books, New York City
Photographer’s Gallery, London
Reference Point, London
Huis Marseille, Amsterdam
Yvon Lambert, Paris