Chapter 1—Never let me go

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In 200 Years 1000 Stories, artists Natasha Lara Hughes and James Dean Diamond present a dual photographic inquiry into the urban fabric of London and Paris, each contributing a deeply personal yet dialogically engaged visual perspective. The work is structured around a rigorously considered sequence, where the placement and rhythm of each image are integral to its meaning. This compositional strategy emphasizes the dialogue between form, space, and perception, inviting viewers to experience the city as both an external environment and an interior landscape.

​For Hughes, the project extends from a lived experience marked by trauma, escape, and transformation. Her flight from captivity and violence in Prague—alongside her infant daughter and with support from the British Embassy—provides the emotional and conceptual framework for her contribution. Her visual language is defined by restraint and precision, characterized by a minimalist approach that privileges light as a fundamental structural and expressive force. Through this lens, the urban environment becomes a site of both rupture and stillness, where fleeting moments of grace and spiritual resonance emerge from spaces marked by tension, absence, and memory.

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Diamond's work is informed by a neurological and ocular condition that distorts visual perception. Rather than concealing or correcting this distortion, Diamond embraces it as a site of authenticity—a phenomenological truth. His imagery reflects a heightened sensory state, revealing the city as simultaneously disorienting and emotionally charged. The project’s title, 200 Years, references a remark from his ophthalmologist, who described his vision as akin to that of a 200-year-old—transforming clinical observation into a conceptual anchor for his exploration of altered seeing.

Together, Hughes and Diamond navigate the city through divergent but intersecting modalities: one rooted in trauma and spiritual recovery, the other in sensory distortion and altered cognition. What unites them is a shared impulse to excavate the unseen—to uncover the latent narratives embedded within the architecture, surfaces, and atmospheres of urban space. 200 Years 1000 Stories is thus a meditation on perception, vulnerability, and the multiplicity of lived experience within the contemporary city.

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The photographic practice is a journey through urban environments, where the city is experienced as both landscape and memory. His perception is shaped by a unique condition that alters vision, producing an approach to photography that is intuitive, dreamlike, and emotionally attuned. Rather than framing each shot in a conventional way, Diamond relies on chance, sensation, and selective engagement to create images that feel lived rather than constructed. The black-and-white photographs evoke memory and temporal layering, exploring how experiences persist and fade. The work reflects the tension between the immensity of the city and individual experience, rendering metropolitan life as simultaneously intimate, overwhelming, and transcendent.