Jon Parker Lee: New Exhibition Comes to Manchester's Northern Quarter

Oh Manchester. SO much to answer for. Little did I think when I arrived here as a rosy-cheeked undergraduate clutching a new pencil case and some laughably unformed literary pretensions that I would still be here one hundred years later, and still so much in love with your sexy, rainy, grimy beauty that I really couldn't consider living anywhere else (except maybe Paris, if anyone's offering - I don't like snails, but can speak French and am pretty good at working a ballet pump).

So I'm looking forward to a new exhibition opening later this month at 2022NQ, a venue that seems able to turn its hand to most things and where I have had some thoroughly memorable nights out in recent months. Jon Parker Lee is celebrating ten years as a freelance photographer with an exhibition looking back over his time in the business - a period which has seen the move from film to digital (largely a good thing, obviously, although resulting in the posting by certain souls of several hundred near-identical look-at-me, I'm-on-a-top-night-out and I've taken loads of photos to prove it pictures), as well as social shifts such as a change of government, gay marriage, and somebody else FINALLY winning the Premiership.

All of this and more is documented in Jon's exhibition, and as he is a Manchester-based photographer there will be plenty of pictures of our fair city - in both its most pictureseque and, erm, less salubrious guises: “You get to see all kinds of lives, from people living on sink estates where the burglars are stealing the roofs from over their heads, to back stage with the world’s biggest selling music acts; and the latter isn’t generally much more glamorous than the former.” The exhibition runs from 22nd November to 8th December, and promises to be well worth a look if the following images are anything to go by.

- 2022NQ is on Dale Street, and the exhibition will be open Fridays 12 noon - 12 midnight and Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays 10am – 5pm.