Stephen Hughes is a music, portrait and documentary photographer from Glasgow, Scotland.

This book introduces an important new artist and an outstanding body of work, made by Stephen Hughes during the last four years at sites all over Europe.

Hughes’s photographs are dedicated to the peripheral, marginal zones and strange disconnected gaps of our contemporary social landscape. These non-places are where stray elements of our culture collect, where strange atmospheres generate and life seems disengaged.

Buildings become apparitions; gleaming white apartment blocks are stranded by the shore and lone figures drift and daydream across the barren edges of newly built cities. A sense of spatial and temporal dislocation gives the work its unifying aesthetic.

Many of Hughes’ photographs focus on coastal sites, misty wind-blown places of loneliness and reverie that seem to harbour the residues of both nature and culture, proud architectural visions that have run aground on rocky outcrops.

Semi-developed or extravagant and incongruous, the buildings become metaphors for a human psychology of disenchantment, of dreams washed away by the sea.

Published by PhotoWorks in association with De La Warr.