“You can see a lot of me in the work”: Alexander Coggin on exhibiting eight years of photographs

Over the past eight years, Alexander Coggin has steadily been filling drives with thousands of flash-bathed images, following his friends, family and er, Gigi Hadid, everywhere from Frieze art fair to a golfing community in Lake Michigan. Now, the photographer is set to launch his first solo show Yeah Magic at Jordy van den Nieuwendijk’s Ninasagt Galerie as part of Düsseldorf Photo Weekend.

“The works are a really good overview from the past eight years of shooting,” Alexander considers. So, when beginning the mammoth mission of trawling through an eight year-long archive, what qualities was Alexander hunting for? “I tried to focus on images that have a really magic feel to them,” he explains. “I’m always interested in augmenting my reality through flash mediation, and a lot of these images were shot that way. I think you can see a lot of me in the work, the use of flash mediation allows for the omnipresence of the photographer to come through the images, so in a way the work is also autobiographical.”

Alexander’s theatrical background has him constantly on the hunt for quirks of character and circumstance whether he’s lensing a family of tourists or an inventive approach to visual merchandising in a shop window. He considers himself a street photographer through and through, “meaning that I’m constantly shooting the world around me and adding to a body of work on an ad-hoc basis (as opposed to building standard bodies of work).” This being the case, Alexander’s work, whether taking the form of an exhibition, book or on Instagram, is ever-changing. “And this show is a showcasing of my current repertoire.”

Like Alexander’s eye for the unexpected, Yeah Magic comes with a twist. “I’ll be showing works in a variety of sizes, unframed and framed, as well as printing on sweatshirts, mugs, clocks, puzzles and sandals, as I wanted to explore how my images translate when outsourced to online digital printing companies,” he says. “The quality of the printing really varies, another way to mediate the image from the original base-reality from which it was taken.”