Natalie Curtis
Because I Want Nothing

This limited artist’s book follows the 2023 exhibition ‘Because I Want Nothing’ at Moon Grove, Manchester by the Macclesfield-born, Manchester- and London-based photographer Natalie Curtis.

Taken during lockdown and printed in late 2023, Curtis’s twelve concise images speak of a transformation between two dramatically different times.

Depicting three main subjects – railway landscapes in Cheshire, a suburban garden in north London and portraits taken on walks in Highgate and Salford – each image dwells on periods of internment, forbidden travel and attempts at intimacy.

Together with changing perspectives of this time – including elements of amnesia; a bafflement with the past and the everyday practical realities of active life in Lombardy and the UK in the present – Curtis’ works dwell on a shift in locations and her ongoing itinerant existence.

With the publication’s title taken from a line in the 2021 track Musica leggerissima, a hit in Italy by the duo Colapesce Dimartino, the works within it reinterpret the song’s message at a time of post-isolation within a pattern of conflicting viewpoints. In concrete terms, ‘wanting for nothing’ oscillates between ideas of privilege (I want for nothing), stoicism, ethical self-denial, a drive for aesthetic autonomy, and an almost absurd existential nihilistic rejection of mainstream politics. Through this spartan desire for disinterested truth, these photographs exist in a gap that contradicts polarities exemplified by the agenda of western culture wars, alongside false moral sanctities and the real violence enacted by oppressive regimes in a global context.

Aside from this, these miniature works – which have a dark, ephemeral, ethereal, and otherworldly character redolent of northern British semi-rural, semi-urban areas – hold the quality of small paintings, a fact that serves to help them act as mysterious vignettes that invite the eye in to examine uncertain ineffable worlds.

Influences on the artist include the photographer Daido Moriyama; Saintscapes, a book conceived by artist Claudio Beorchia consisting of images related to votive shrines from the Italian region of Lombardy; subjects including James Ellroy’s L.A., Joseph Knox’s Manchester and Alan Garner’s Cheshire; painter Milton Avery’s formal dance between landscape and abstraction, with its historical link between Matisse and Ab-Ex; and Duane Michals, one of the twentieth century’s most innovative photographers.

Natalie Curtis (b. 1979, Macclesfield), lives in Manchester / London, UK and works wherever her camera takes her. She has exhibited in Manchester’s Piccadilly Station (2016) with her light box installation SWAYS Stills and her debut gallery show, Malibu Night Waves, was held in Paris in (2020). She is represented by Galerie Arnaud Lefebvre, Paris and by Artimage, London.

Edited by Natalie Curtis and Andrew Hunt.

Designed by Matthew Clifton.

Softback, 21 pages, 16 colour illustrations, Colorplan Candy Pink 350gsm cover, Beluga 130gsm inners, 8.5” x 11”.

ISBN: 978-1-910516-25-6

Artist’s book printed in a limited run of 100 numbered and initialled copies.