Tim I

From the series 'BLUE BOYS'.
Exhibited at The Brighton Box Gallery for Artists Open Houses 2026.

At the beginning of photography, there was light and chemistry. The cyanotype process was invented in 1842 and the deep blue is a result of a chemical process.

BLUE BOYS takes that visual language as its starting point and combines it with the homoerotic gaze, which is as old as time itself, to create images of men – tender, charged, unguarded – rendered in a blue that carries the weight of photographic history.

Chris Jepson is a Brighton-based photographer whose work centres on LGBTQIA+ lives, identity, and community. Through Proud Studios CIC, he creates documentary portrait projects that sit at the intersection of fine art and social practice – among them The Identity Project, Beyond the Binary and Queer Elders, an ongoing exploration of memory and intergenerational queer experience.

BLUE BOYS marks a departure into process-led studio work, bringing together the visual heritage of early photography and queer visual culture in prints that are conceived as objects – made to last, made to be held.

(printed artwork will not have the watermark or OOPS! sticker.)