Miles Aldridge: A Drop of Red #2

In Miles Aldridge’s work, each scene is highly constructed with painstaking attention to lighting, composition and colour. Yet a recurring element of his surreal tableaux is an underlying sense of discomfort. Admiring Hitchcock’s ability to render the ordinary strange and sinister, Aldridge has identified his own aim as being to “stop the viewer from turning the page of the magazine”.

This is certainly achieved in his photograph, ‘A Drop of Red #2’, where Aldridge presents the precise moment that a ketchup bottle smashes to pieces on a pristine kitchen floor. It is no accident that one might consider Aldridge’s images as stills from a film, the unfolding scene as part of a wider story. With his alluring use of vibrant colour, Aldridge invites the viewer to run with their imagination and indulge in his hyper-real narratives.

There are only a few prints remaining of this photograph, with the largest size now only available as an Artist Proof print from a sold out edition of three.