“Richard Ansett’s large Lambda print is an ambiguous document. Image_06_083 2010 is a portrait that is insolently provocative yet darkly reserved. A middle-aged man in a grey suit yawns as his half-shut eyes carelessly engage the camera/viewer. There is a tension between the staged and the accidental, the momentary and perpetual. Is the subject of the portrait (whose attire references the aesthetic of bureaucracy) telling us he’s bored? And if so, with what: His life, art, us? As an image Ansett’s work is disarmingly simple and eloquently realised.”
Fay Nicolson, an Magazine 03.2011
“For all its art-world froideur and its antiseptic, scientific gleam, Ansett’s photo has that kind of sympathy, that kind of humanity.”
Read Full Article Blake Gopnik, The Washington Post 12.2010
“Richard Ansett’s images do not flatter to deceive… humour offsets a gritty realism”
Diane Smyth, British Journal of Photography
“..sensitive and touching portraiture.”
Lee Swillingham
“Ansett’s portraits show the extraordinary in the ordinary and vice versa..”
Manfrd Zollner, FOTOmagazin, Germany
“Richard Ansett is without question one of the UK’s top contemporary photographers… His work (sic) is focused on exploring the limits we place in our minds on what goes beyond being socially acceptable, and what should perhaps just seem normal. ..They are stunning, shocking, and stark – but most of all, they are wonderful photographs.”
“Richard Ansett’s portrait of Sasha is compelling viewing. It is bold and beautiful with the power to shock. Yet there is a subtle message of accepting our appearance in a society so conscious of how it looks. There is lots of light and competition for space, yet the viewer’s eye goes straight to the subject. The true sign of a top photographer is to focus the viewer’s attention despite whatever else is happening within the frame”
Matt Grayson, London Informer
“Ansett’s work explodes the myth of documentary image making, calling into question the assumed complicity between photographer and subject. Ansett resturctures his environments using tools such as dislocation and unfamiliarity in order to shed light on narratives that would other wise remain hidden.”
Etan J Ilfeld, TENDERPIXEL gallery
About Ron & Roger – “Ansett’s Images make an extremely powerful archive of modern lives”
Caroline Smith, Review Art
About ‘LESLIE CROWTHER … An Iconiclastic pantomime’ – “wonderfully cheesy and offbeat”
http://www.artslant.com/lon/artists/show/165339-leslie-crowther
London Evening Standard