We are excited to announce that on Thursday 18 September Marc Vallée will bring his talk From Zine To Museum Wall to darkroom, as the prelude to a discussion about the ‘destination of the image’. In this he will suggest an alternative methodology to the traditional prioritisation of the gallery as the first rung on the ladder to success.
He has given this talk at multiple universities including London College of Communication (University of the Arts London) and Regent’s University London.
“For me it’s about the destination of the image. I actually do a lecture, a talk on this, at different universities, called From Zine to Museum Wall. I use my Vandals in the City zine, it’s the one of graffiti writers I spent a year with. The original destination of those pictures was a self-published zine. I pointed out to the guys at the time that the pictures could go anywhere, and I think they were, like “yeah, whatever.” After the zine was published, the work was included in a major exhibition at the Museum of London called London Nights and the images were used for the posters you could buy from the gift shop as well as on the London tube walls to advertise the exhibition, huge posters that millions of people saw across the tube network. It went from zine to the museum wall and then tube wall. If I hadn't made the zine in the first place, none of that would have happened.” - Marc Vallée, METAL Magazine, 2025. (Link: https://metalmagazine.eu/en/post/marc-vallee)
Marc Vallée (b. 1968) is a documentary photographer based in London. His work focuses primarily on subcultures – queer youth, sex workers, political dissidents and graffiti writers, as well as skaters, punks and surfers. The principal destination for his work is self-published zines and photobooks, notably Number Thirteen (2020), Vandals and the City (2016) and Anti-Skateboarding Devices (2012), – along with the recent series of photobooks: 90s Archive: Volume One, Two and Three (2022-24). Notable group exhibitions include those at the Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool (2025), The Photographers’ Gallery, London (2024), Stills Centre for Photography, Edinburgh (2024), Martin Parr Foundation, Bristol (2022), Somerset House, London (2021), and the London Museum (2018). Marc’s prints are held in private and public collections including those of the London Museum and the Martin Parr Foundation. His zines and photobooks are held in the collections of Tate Britain, London; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the London Museum; Martin Parr Foundation, Bristol; and Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP), Paris.