Photographer Stephen Iliffe on his Deaf Mosaic exhibition ahead of his appearance on Sky’s Breakfast News

Stephen will appear live on Sky TV’s Breakfast News to discuss Deaf Mosaic with presenter Anna Jones on Friday 19th May at around 9.15am. 

I’m Stephen Iliffe, I was born deaf in Gibraltar (UK) and grew up in Leicester. I studied photography at university in the 1980s. After graduation, I applied for 50 jobs and got nowhere.

Employers everywhere consider my inability to use the old ring-deal telephones as a barrier. This was before the arrival of text phones, email, WhatsApp. So, I drifted out of photography for four decades and took up a career with deaf charities where I campaigned for change.

Finally in 2020, I resigned from a secure office job to take the risk and go freelance. I wanted to return to my first love, photography.

So, I started Deaf Mosaic in 2020 as a portrait of the UK deaf community, made up of individual deaf people from different backgrounds. To date, I’ve taken around 70 portraits and taken together, they form a ‘mosaic’ of different ethnicities, occupations and ways of life.

I often think of the UK deaf community as being like a mosaic. The individual pieces are all unique, but together we form a bigger picture, a community with its own rich culture.

You can see the online Deaf Mosaic gallery at www.deaf-mosaic.com/gallery The internet makes it a global stage. To date, it has been visited by 18,500+ people from all over the world.

Deaf Mosaic is my most personal project to date. Previously, I’d done little photo essays around a wide range of topics – from street photography to landscapes to abstracts. Yet I never quite seemed to complete a project or find an audience for it.

During the 2020 Covid pandemic I was stuck at home for months trying to figure out what to do next when I had that ‘Eureka’ moment. It’s often said that the best photographers focus on what they know, or people they know. So, I thought, well the deaf community is ‘my community’ so maybe I should focus on that?

Initially, the main challenge was the pandemic, I had to work out how to do the work safely. I started with outdoor shoots using social distancing and then as the pandemic receded did indoor ones too.

The exhibition’s portraits range from a female vicar to a Muslim kickboxer, a deaf-blind athlete to a gypsy fairground traveller, a charity leader to a fashion model. Each has their own story to share with us.

The public response so far has been brilliant. While TV and film is in some ways the ideal medium for recording deaf people and sign language, my ‘old school’ photography still has a part to play. By creating a still photograph you are freezing a moment in time, capturing a person’s essence, allowing the viewer to study it.

Deaf children respond so enthusiastically to the Deaf Mosaic. When I grew up I was isolated in mainstream hearing school and had zero adult deaf role models to look up to. I don’t want to see this happening again – that’s one thing that drives me on.

One of the best parts of my work has been staging print exhibitions. It’s one thing to consume tiny images on a mobile phone, all of us do that all the time. But it’s another thing to print a large image onto paper and hang it on a wall. In a wall-mouted print, there’s more emotion, a deeper and richer story is told.

This month, I’ve staged my first-ever outdoor exhibition at Kings Cross. 54 giant-sized portraits placed in a busy space just outside the major railway station. It’s on for four weeks until 28 May.

Over a million people (residents, commuters, shoppers, tourists) will pass through the public spaces where the 54 Deaf Mosaic portraits are shown. It’s been incredible. It’s as if this super-busy public space has been ‘taken over’ by the deaf community for a whole month.

What I’d like to see next is more deaf creatives having their work in major and regional museums galleries and public spaces. I don’t just mean photography – I’m talking about painting, sculpture, multi-media, installations, etc.  From Martin Glover to Maral Mamaghanizadeh, from Cathy Woolley to Peace Adeosun. There are so many out there who belong on a bigger stage.

It’s time to tell all these arts institutions – even the biggest ones – that while we appreciate your discounts, BSL tours, captioned videos, and so on – too often this becomes a tick box exercise. We want see deaf creatives inside the galleries too. We’ve been invisible for far too long. Give us due respect as artists, not just passive consumers of artworks by hearing people.

For myself, my next goal is to get Deaf Mosaic toured around the UK, it’s only been on show in London so far. A lot of hard work lies ahead in terms of funding and logistics, but I’m ambitious and will go for it.

Stephen will appear live on Sky TV’s Breakfast News to discuss Deaf Mosaic with presenter Anna Jones on Friday 19th May at around 9.15am. 

Stephen’s online Deaf Mosaic gallery can be seen at www.deaf-mosaic.com/gallery

Deaf Mosaic at Kings Cross is open 24/7 daily until Sunday 28 May.