Chapter 1—Never let me go

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In 200 Years 1000 Stories, artists Natasha Lara Hughes and James Dean Diamond unfold a twin meditation on the city—London and Paris rendered not as destinations, but as living, breathing archives of memory. Their images converse across distance, each photograph placed with deliberate rhythm, forming a sequence that acts less like a gallery wall and more like a score. In this arrangement, silence matters as much as form; the pauses between images become thresholds where perception shifts, where interior and exterior worlds blur. Viewers move through the work as one moves through a city at dusk—alert to light, to shadow, to the quiet insistence of space.

Hughes’s contribution rises from a life indelibly shaped by rupture and re-emergence. Her escape from captivity and violence in Prague—fleeing with only her infant daughter in her arms, under the protection of the British Embassy—forms the subterranean current of her visual language. In her photographs, restraint becomes strength; precision becomes testimony. Stripped of all materiality, a literal translation of her experience, light is her architecture: a measured, minimalist force that reveals what the city tries to conceal. In her hands, the urban landscape becomes a place where fracture and stillness coexist, where grace surfaces unexpectedly in the margins, and where spiritual resonance gathers in the spaces touched by memory, absence, and survival.

Diamond’s photographic practice emerges from a neurological and ocular condition that bends the visible world into unfamiliar contours. Instead of masking this distortion, he accepts it as a form of truth—as the way the world insists on arriving to him. His images vibrate with this altered perception, charged with disorientation and emotional intensity, as though the city were trembling at the edge of recognition. The title 200 Years recalls a remark from his ophthalmologist, who once described his vision as akin to that of a two-century-old; a clinical comment transfigured into a poetic framework for his exploration of the uncanny, the fragile, and the beautifully skewed.

In concert, Hughes and Diamond move through the city by different pathways—hers shaped by trauma and spiritual reclamation, his by sensory fracture and reconstituted sight. Their collaboration becomes a quiet covenant, a way of seeing one another in the aftermath of their experiences. What binds their practices is a shared longing to uncover what may be a hidden world to some: the stories pressed into walls, the atmospheres that haunt thresholds, the murmurs that live between light and form.

Together, 200 Years 1000 Stories is a meditation on perception and vulnerability—a testament to how many lives, visions, and ghosts reside within the space, and how two wounded ways of seeing converge to reveal a deeper, quieter truth.

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