GOD'S FOX - PHOTOGRAPHY EXHIBITION CHARLES GORDON MONTGOMERY

Digbeth Art Space - Presents

God's Fox - 14-11-25 til 10-01-26

Launch - 14-11-25 - 6pm - 9pm

Exhibition is open 7 days per week from 9am - 5pm from the 15th Nov 25 (no ticket is needed)

Digbeth Art Space is to present a new exhibition of photographs from the archive of Charles Gordon Montgomery – the greatest photographer you have never heard of - collected in the book God’s Fox by author & filmmaker Austin Collings.

The show opens on Friday 14th November, running until Saturday 10th January, and offers a portrait of the northern town of Prestwich, Manchester in the 1970s, 80s and 90s—capturing its residents and, in particular, the elderly patients of the former psychiatric hospital.

An exhibition that goes beyond mere nostalgia to explore the uneasy truth beneath the surface of everyday life, Montgomery’s images, painstakingly retrieved by Collings from a forgotten archive, are not just a record of a time and place, but a forensic examination of a fading world.Here are the forgotten textures of the past: the clinical corridors of an institution, the faded floral wallpaper, and the worn faces of those who inhabited these spaces.

The photographs operate on multiple frequencies, moving between the banal and the profound, the gentle and the unsettling. Images of patients in the hospital grounds are at once disarming and haunting, conveying a fragile serenity shot through with a deeper melancholy.In other frames, local pub characters and street scenes are captured in unvarnished detail, frozen forever in a moment that has since dissolved into history. Immerse yourself in a Britain on the cusp of profound and disorienting change.

The exhibition is a collaboration with Austin Collings, Kay Fisher and Pariah Press— who published the God’s Fox in 2021. A limited-edition catalogue will be available to buy on the opening night.