Fancy Pictures brings together six of Mark Neville's socially engaged and intensely immersive projects from the last decade. He often pictures tight working communities in a collaborative process intended to be of direct, practical benefit to his subjects. The Port Glasgow Book Project (2004) is a book of his social documentary images of the Scottish town. Never commercially available, copies were given directly to all 8000 residents. A second Scottish project involved Neville living and working with the farming community of the Isle of Bute for 18 months.
Deeds Not Words (2011) focuses on Corby, an English town with a strong post-industrial identity that has suffered serious industrial pollution. Assembling photos and scientific data, he produced a book to be given free to the environmental health services department of each of the 433 local councils in the UK.
In 2011 Neville spent three months working on the front line in Helmand, Afghanistan, as an official war artist. He made stills using multiple flash systems, and 16mm movies employing high-speed slow motion cameras. Often taken whilst out on patrol, Growing up in Helmand (2011) depicts a military occupancy by young people, almost children, of a country also populated by young people. Young Afghanis have taken on adult responsibilities early in life, mirroring the age of the teenage troops they engage with.
Two projects for the USA are also included. Invited by the Andy Warhol Museum in 2012, Neville looked at the legacy of the steel industry in Pittsburgh, USA, through the prism of contemporary class and race. The critically acclaimed photo essay Here is London, commissioned by the New York Times Magazine, echoes the style of the celebrated photographers who documented the boom and bust of the 70s and 80s.