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A Moment In Time 


Seeing the world through a camera phone is not really seeing the world, says artist Idris Khan.  

Idris Khan

Like most of us, artist Idris Khan takes photos every day. Mainly of his kids, Maude and Jago, but other stuff such as food, friends, sunsets, as most of us do. 

It was only when he realised he had accumulated 65,000 photos over the six-year lifespan of his phone that it hit him. 

He thought back to when his mother died in 2010, aged 59. A nurse from Wales who converted to Islam when she met his father, Khan’s mother had exactly 380 photos to represent her entire life.  

The disparity inspired him to build an 8m-high public sculpture that now stands proudly outside One Blackfriars, a collection of luxury residences from developer St George on London’s South Bank. Art is a central theme of One Blackfriars, with architects Simpson Haugh inspired by the Lansetti Vase for the building’s unique shape. 

65,000 Photographs outside of One Blackfriars by St George (c) Steven White

Khan’s aluminium-cast sculpture, called 65,000 Photographs, represents what those photos would look like if printed out and stacked on top of one another. Next to it is a miniature version dedicated to his mother, only a metre or so high, representing her 380 photographs. Stacked from the smallest 5x7 print on the bottom to the largest 12x16 print on top, like inverted pyramids, the sculptures convey a sense of fragility. 

They are columns of time, towers with subtle edges of each photograph visible and tangible to the touch. The idea was to highlight the sheer volume of photography in the modern age and the almost forgotten art of photographic printing in a digitised world. 

“There are more than 95 million photos uploaded every day to Instagram,” says 42-year-old Khan. “For me, the question was, what does that look like as a physical representation of time? 

“By making a sculpture with all the photos, it’s like the rings of the tree, it is this period of my life in solid form. And it is quite moving to see that journey in a solid form.” 

We are talking over the phone from his home in London’s Islington. Khan lives in a four-floor Grade II-listed Georgian townhouse, which can trace its foundations to the 1760s. His wife, artist Annie Morris (“she’s a whirlwind of energy”) and their children aged seven and six, who both harbour ambitions to be artists, have been instrumental in the interior décor 

Khan's wife, artist Annie Morris, at their shared studio 

Their home is warm and colourful, filled with travel pieces from India and beyond, lots of bright, cheerful fabrics and favourite works of Khan and Morris, as well as swapsfrom artist friends past and present, such as Sean Scully and John Baldessari 

At their studio in Stoke Newington, both artists work together along with 12 assistants. “We’ve been together 24/7, probably since we met in 2007, says Khan. Khan, who in 2017 was awarded an OBE from the Queen and weeks later won the American Architecture Prize for his design of Abu Dhabi’s Wahat Al Karama, a war memorial, has seen his profile soar exponentially. His work is now in the permanent collections of the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, the Saatchi Gallery, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among many others 

He says the new sculpture is at once a departure from his usual style, and a continuation of it. His earlier work explores layering and stacking time, using multiple photographic exposures from secondary source material, sometimes of buildings, sheet music, pages from the Quran, reproductions of Caravaggio paintings, scanned digitally and sandwiched on top of each other to create an intriguing single image. The resulting images are often large-scale C-prints with surfaces that have a remarkable optical intensity. 

The Quran by Idris Khan

“I was first inspired after travelling around Europe in 1992. Everyone comes back with the same photos and you’re left with a pile of pictures in a drawer. But when you put them all together you have one image representing a period of time.” 

He hopes his new sculpture will inspire people to be more aware of slowing down and seeing the world with their eyes, rather than through a lens. 

“We scroll and scroll through our photos and they become a blur. Think about someone’s wedding day and the photos become the focus of the day, not the couple.” 

On a recent tiger-spotting safari holiday to India, Khan deliberately left his camera and phone at home. “Somehow the camera stops our memory from recording those moments, we become lazy and rely on the pictures. You look at the world very differently when you’re not using your camera and your memories are so much more vivid.” 

This article originally appeared in Billionaire's Summer Issue, themed on Exploration. To subscribe contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.