Lisa Barnard is a British artist, researcher and teacher whose photographic practice focuses on real events, using polymorphic strategies. Her projects use traditional documentary techniques, such as photography, audio, video and text, and more contemporary visual techniques and computer forms.
Barnard combines her interest in aesthetics and current debates on the materiality of photography alongside the political climate, focusing mostly on debates around new technologies, science and the military-industrial complex.
“Barnard describes herself as a photographic artist, but her work appears unmistakably political. It pays homage to the tropes of documentary realism, while sabotaging them. – Sean O Hagan, The Guardian, reviewer for Chateau Despair.
Barnard is Associate Professor and Head of the Masters Program in Documentary Photography at the University of South Wales. In addition to regularly exhibiting her projects, she has published three monographs, including two with GOST (Chateau Despair, supported by the Arts Council and Hyenas of the Battlefield, and Machines in the Garden, supported by the Albert Renger-Patzsch Prize).
Her third publication, The Canary and the Hammer, was published by MACK.