Ahead of his first international solo show, the photographer behind popular YouTube channel Negative Feedback shares his story and the process behind his latest body of work
Last year, George Muncey finally made it to the US. At last, he thought, “I would be able to make the photographs I had always wanted to” – images taken on the road, inspired by photographers like Stephen Shore, Joel Sternfeld and Alec Soth. “But I came back and found there was no depth to the photos, other than that they reminded me of the ones that my favourite photographers had taken.”
It was this initial disappointment that kickstarted Muncey’s latest project, Lonely Cloud, an ongoing survey of the British isles, which will be exhibited for the first time at Periphery Space in Gorey, Ireland, next month. The project takes its name from William Wordsworth’s I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, and is intended to parallel the feeling of floating in solitude, and being disconnected from the place that you came from.
Raised in Basingstoke, southern England, Muncey’s entry into photography was unique. The 23-year-old never studied the subject at school or university, instead he made a name for himself via Negative Feedback, a YouTube channel he set up in 2016. The platform, on which he posts camera reviews, tutorials and interviews with photographers, now has over 185,000 subscribers.
“I didn’t feel like I needed to go to photography school,” says Muncey, who acquired the basis of his technical skill from assisting and editing at a photography studio during his teenage years. After completing a BTEC in film, followed by a short three-week spell of studying it at university, Muncey decided to abandon his studies and taught himself how to use cameras and photoshop through online tutorials. However, surprisingly, he found that there was very little content about photography that was visually engaging. “I wanted to make the kinds of videos that I would want to watch,” he explains.
Off the back of the success of Negative Feedback, Muncey’s photographic career has taken off. Last year, he had his first solo show at theprintspace in The Photographer’s Gallery in London. . And he secured his upcoming exhibition Lonely Cloud at Periphery Space in Ireland, in part, because the art school attached to the space uses his videos in their photography classes.