Circus Work 1970 - 1989
"Early in 1971, I began begging lifts and sleeping rough in travels that took me all over Great Britain to visit circuses. I bedded down in fields and under wagons and sometimes even in them. On one occasion, the most comfortable pallet I could find proved to be in the straw of an empty lion's cage. Most of the time, however, the cages were occupied by lions."
" I was immediately struck by the aesthetic, the elaborate display and the backstage ordinariness. It was in this composition and its balance that I hoped to reveal something of the 'heart' of my subjects.
Peter Lavery
Circus Work 1968 - 2018
"Peter Lavery’s photographs of the circus could at first and above all seem to be a pure sensuous pleasure, even more than they are such certainly truthful documents of their subject. But then they very soon reveal themselves to be lively and faithful portraits of the human beings involved, naturally communicating their unique combination of the earthy, tough and familiar with the exotic, dangerous, and absurd."
Bruce Bernard 1997
Buenes Aires
Life and Death at Brandier
Still Studies
'TWEEDY BACKSTAGE'
Of Humankind
"Pervading all the pictures in this book is that sense of wonderment surely experienced by those pioneering travellers who first brought back haunting documents from far-off places. Lavery's portraits remind us of Cartier-Bressons remark that photographers deal in things which are continuallyvanishing and which no contrivance on earth can bring back."
from the foreward 'Of Humankind' by Robin Muir 2000
Fred and Albert
An extract from a 4 hr long filmed conversation between two brothers from a family of which all the men worked in the pits. Fred Lavery the father of Peter
and uncle Albert.
Transition in Buenos Aires
Homecoming
In January of 2010 a single coffin travelled through the Market town of Wootton Basset.
It stopped in the centre of the high street by the war memorial and was observed by one local who saluted its presence. It's journey was almost at an end.
This was to be the start of an extraordinary period of time for a small Wiltshire town.
What was chosen as a place for the repatriation and 'Homecoming' of the soldiers who had given their lives for the nation was about to become 'JOURNEYS END', a place of focus for the families who had suffered an ultimate sacrifice.
'On The Road Again'
Cuba
Racing Dogs
Vienna
Our Legacy