Saturday Town is a photography series by the award-winning photographer Casey Orr. Since 2013 Casey has travelled throughout the UK with her pop-up portrait studio photographing young people on Saturday afternoons. The project explores fashion, identity and the self-expression of young people on Saturday afternoons on the high streets and public spaces of towns across the country.
This is the largest show of Saturday Town and Casey Orr’s first retrospective show.
Bronwyn Andrews, exhibition assistant curator and creative producer at Open Eye Gallery, said: “Are we different now? How do you picture yourself? How does it feel to belong, or rebel? What makes you feel like you?
Saturday Town acts as a mosaic of youth subculture, fashion-dialects and self expression in the north of England over the last 11 years. Through a tumultuous period which has seen a global pandemic, the dissolution of the gender binary and the death of the highstreet, Casey Orr holds up a sign which reads ‘These young people are important!’
Open Eye Gallery are thrilled to host Casey Orr’s first retrospective and platform the unique fashion and visual language of the north, highlighting young people’s identities and style as culturally significant. We are delighted to facilitate conversations around belonging, identity, community and self representation through this work.
Casey Orr, photographer, said: “The project acts as a witness to young lives. Taking these photographs continues to excite me as it evolves and refers to the times in which we live, as well as a shared past that is reinvented and flows through new generations. Fashion and bodily self-expression are important and powerful tools for us all, to state who we are beyond consumerism and capitalism; beyond selfies and social media platforms”.
Saturday Town started in 2013 as Saturday Girl, when Casey Orr started photographing young women in Leeds on Saturday afternoons and exploring what it meant in terms of culture, tribe identities and values and how these things burst forth in the unspoken language of fashion and bodily self-expression.
After that Casey took the studio on the road throughout the UK, visiting over 20 cities and photographing over 800 people. Casey said, “Liverpool women just blew me away with their style. The Liverpool aesthetic of wearing curlers in your hair whilst out shopping on a Saturday afternoon is just so playful and expressive, saying to the world: “I’m going out tonight!”
Saturday Girl turned into Saturday Town, as the project has developed into a space for all gender expressions. The portraits aren’t styled beyond personal decisions made in front of bedroom mirrors. These images are a document of culture, read through fashion.
Saturday afternoons are spaces of freedom – from school, family and institutions. Saturdays are often a time when groups of young friends gather together in city centres and high streets to shop and hang out, to look and be seen.
We invite you to the exhibition where every day is Saturday.
Event Date: Thursday 11th April 2024 - Saturday 18th May 2024
Location: Open Eye Gallery
Categories: Photography
