‘In 2002 Rory Carnegie was invited by the Oxford Literary Festival to take part in a photographic and literary project with some of the many young asylum seekers who live in the City. Alongside the writer Nikki Van Der Gaag, Carnegie began to meet up with young people, sometimes in groups and sometimes individually over a three-year period. Each year a different group exhibited the photographs and thoughts in a display in the Entrance Space at Modern Art Oxford. For a community project involving 14 to 18-year-olds, estranged not only from the countries but, for the most part, their families too, the images and texts were remarkably strong and self-possessed. Not only did they contradict media stereotypes of those seeking refugee status, they testified to the social and technical skills of both van der Gaag and Carnegie. Over the period of the project, Carnegie also made his own photographs. It is these images which are on display in Local Stories.’

Modern Art Oxford