Alexandra Lethbridge: The Meteorite Hunter and its one real find

The Meteorite Hunter

The Meteorite Hunter is an archive of a search — for meteorites, and for the places they come from. It follows the journey of a hunter who does not exist, and documents the artefacts found along the way, presenting the overlooked and the celebrated equally and without disparity. That flatness of presentation is the work's central device rather than a stylistic choice.

The series argues that the quest to experience something unique can overshadow the familiar, and it uses the meteorite as a metaphor for the fantastic hidden in the mundane. The work is presented as a collection of artefacts in which only one of the objects is an actual meteorite. Which one is not disclosed, so the reader is enlisted into the search rather than shown its result.

By combining factual and fictional material and playing on the ambiguity of the imagery, Lethbridge creates circumstances in which everyday objects have to be reconsidered — the familiar made unfamiliar by the possibility that any given stone might be the one that fell.

A research-based practice mixing fact and fiction

Born in Hong Kong in 1987 and based in the UK, Lethbridge graduated from the University of Brighton with a master's in photography, having previously studied at Winchester School of Art and the International Center of Photography in New York.

Found photographs, archival imagery and constructed images of her own making form the basis of her research-based practice. She draws on a wide range of source material and combines scientific theory with fictional constructed images, bringing them together as storytelling. The approach is deliberately playful and experimental, and it mixes fact and fiction on purpose in order to expand the view of whatever subject she is working on.

Alongside personal projects and commissions she worked for the photography development agency Photoworks, which places her on both sides of the funding relationship this archive documents.

Prizes, publications and the first photobook

Her work has been exhibited widely, including at the Encontros da Imagem festival in Portugal, the Pingyao International Photography Festival in China, and in India as part of PhotoUKIndia.

In 2014 she was shortlisted for the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation First PhotoBook Award for The Meteorite Hunter and was named professional choice winner of the Danny Wilson Memorial Award in association with Brighton Photo Fringe. She was selected for Fresh Faced and Wild Eyed in 2015, won a place in Flash Forward from the Magenta Foundation the same year, and was a finalist in the Renaissance Photography Prize. The Meteorite Hunter was shortlisted for the Anamorphosis Prize and the publication is now part of the Museum of Modern Art's book collection.

In 2015 the Guardian described her as a rising star of British photography, and her work has appeared in HotShoe, Source, Der Greif, Photoworks, Self Publish Be Happy, Pik, Float, Introdex, Wired and the Telegraph online.

There is a neat coincidence in the record worth noting. Meteorites appear twice in the material around the Firecracker grant: once in Lethbridge's constructed search, and once in Regine Petersen's Fragments, a narrative about meteorite showers that was highly commended in the 2013 grant cycle. Two photographers, working independently, found the same object useful for the same reason — a stone that falls out of the sky is the clearest available image of the extraordinary arriving in an ordinary place.

The undisclosed meteorite also does something structural that is easy to miss on a first pass: it converts the book from a sequence into a game with rules. Once the reader knows that exactly one object is real, every photograph acquires the same weight of suspicion — the stone, the diagram, the archival print, the constructed still life — and the act of looking becomes an act of testing. That is the research-based method turned outward. Lethbridge spends the making of the work interrogating her sources, mixing the found with the fabricated; the finished book then transfers that interrogation to whoever holds it. Very few photobooks manage to make their reader perform the practice that produced them, and it is a fair explanation of why this one travelled as far through the prize lists as it did.