Shots at life: Juliet England meets photographer Stephen Iliffe, creator of Deaf Mosaic

A postman smiles, clearly enjoying being out and about on his rounds. A dark-haired woman, unspeakably elegant in full 1940s retro suit, complete with hat and gloves, poses in front of a sky-blue door. A kick-boxer stands poised in turban and boxing gloves, ready for anything as she smashes stereotypes of what a Muslim female ‘should’ look like. A vicar sits in her church, a girl in a hijab signs, a Jewish woman lights Hannukah candles. A paramedic gazes into the camera from outside her ambulance, a strongman pretends to lift a fairground ride, a swimmer floats in a pond. A Mongolian daughter holds up a book with her solider father on the front cover.

These are just some of the images currently on display as part of Deaf Mosaic, which runs at City Lit London until April 28^th and is the work of photographer Stephen Iliffe, 60, who was born bilaterally severely deaf and had a cochlear implant fitted five years ago. He’s a married father of two grown-up children, and his wife Emma, who is also deaf and works for City Lit as a BSL coordinator, is one of the subjects for the project.

The images displayed represent just some of those gathered for Deaf Mosaic, which also has a more extensive online gallery and remains a work in progress.

Leicester-born Iliffe now living in north London, attended a mainstream school before studying graphic design and photography at his home city’s De Montfort University he tells me over lunch on the afternoon of the launch of his exhibition, in the café at City Lit in central London.

“I’d originally been offered a place to study English at the University of Kent at Canterbury, but when they realised I couldn’t hear they wrote to me to withdraw the offer.”

It’s something that, in 2022, seems hard to believe could actually have happened. (It certainly takes me a while to remove my jaw from the floor when I hear this.) Yet Iliffe had no knowledge that a deaf community, or even sign language, existed until one long-ago Sunday morning after graduation, during a time when he was struggling to find work. (“You had to be able to use a phone to do just about any job and I couldn’t do that.”) By chance, he caught an episode of See Hear! which was to change his life.

“Everything flowed from there – it was as though a light had been turned on in a dark room.”

Iliffe worked freelance for a couple of years, found his place in the deaf community and learned sign language. For 28, years he worked for deaf organisations, as a researcher, campaigner, information officer and manger, first with RNID and then with the National Deaf Children’s Society.

Then, in his mid-fifties he decided to take the plunge and leave behind the security of full-time employment to devote all his time to his passion for art, writing and photography.

“It was then or never. And my love for taking photos dates to my youth, when I found taking photos of people at, say, Leicester Market, was an easier way of engaging with people when I couldn’t hear them – although I also love shooting landscapes.”

There have been previous projects, including taking the pictures of deaf refugees from Iraq and one involving the (general) Asian community in his native Leicester at Diwali time.

“It’s a wonderful community and occasion and there’s certainly a lot to photograph, but I was recording it as an outsider, a tourist, rather than as someone who belonged.”

And so he came up with the idea for the intimate series of portraits making up his first print exhibition, each one conveying a subtly different feeling, from strength and resilience to pride and vulnerability. He has put together the project with the help of Arts Council funding.

“Our community is a diverse one made up of so many varied backgrounds but each piece is part of the bigger picture, just like a mosaic.”

Some subjects were already known to Iliffe, others made themselves known to him or he sought them out via social media and other means.

The images are shown so that viewers are at eye level with the subjects in the portraits to heighten the emotional connection with them, and each one has an explanatory note which can also be viewed in BSL online via a QR code. (Iliffe, also a keen wordsmith, wrote these.)

Just about every age, gender, skin colour, sexuality and body size is represented in Deaf Mosaic, along with a fair range of different original nationalities from Mongolia to Sri Lanka and elsewhere. A deaf-blind father is also portrayed gazing lovingly, if sightlessly, in to the eyes of his young son.

Dispensing briskly with stereotypes, it portrays deaf people as the vibrant, incredibly diverse community we know we are, but whose range others may not yet fully appreciate.

• Deaf Mosaic runs at City Lit until April 28
• City Lit has provided support for deaf people since its establishment in 1919. Some of the first courses it offered were lipreading classes for deafened soldiers returning from World War I. It is now the largest centre of its kind in Europe: https://www.citylit.ac.uk/deaf
• https://deaf-mosaic.com/