Ayo Banton was born in Leeds (UK) in 1969. He picked up his first camera at the age of eight: a Polaroid given to him by his mother. It was the beginning of a lifelong obsession. When he moved to London in the 1990s, he found himself at the centre of a generation of Black British artists, musicians and creatives who were reshaping British culture. Banton proceeded to build one of the most accomplished careers in British commercial and editorial photography, working at the highest levels of the fashion and beauty industries. Banton’s creative vision and technical mastery are foundational not only to his commercial success, but to the extraordinary artistic practice which he has developed in parallel for over three decades.Banton's artistic influences are both deep and wide-ranging. Growing up in a British-Caribbean household, he recalls experiencing music as something physical from a young age, with bass frequencies that reverberated through his entire body. This ultimately led him to cymatics: the scientific study of visualising sound through matter. Working with water as his medium, he is able to capture the complex, breathtaking visual geometries hidden within sound frequencies. For his pioneering work bridging science, art and sound, Banton was named the EMI Archive Trust’s first ever artist-in-residence in 2022. He has since brought to life songs and albums by some of the most important artists of all time, from Miles Davis to The Beatles and Bob Marley. You can delve deeper into Banton’s Sound Made Visible series here. Banton's work rests on a single, animating belief: that there is more to the world than we ordinarily see. In sound, and equally in the flora and fauna of the natural world that surrounds us, he finds hidden structures, hidden beauty and hidden meaning that his practice brings to light. In his acclaimed botanical series such as Brutiful, Banton painstakingly creates floral arrangements by hand, drawing on his lifelong passion for ikebana (the Japanese art often translated as "giving life to flowers"). Inspired by the Baroque masters, particularly Caravaggio, and the Dutch Golden Age, Banton's painterly photographs transcend their medium and elevate his everyday subjects into meditations on beauty, mortality and the divine. Discover the full breadth of Banton's botanical practice here.
