Nigel Shafran's photography dances between the vitality and serendipity of domestic life in Ruthbook and Washing-up 2000 and the still, mournful passivity of the discarded and the little used Dad's Office and Charity shops. It is a strange combination of intense melancholy and a robust joie de vivre. Throughout all of his photographs, there is a sense of wanting to still time, to preserve a moment, to document a passing. His work is, perhaps, an acknowledgement of loss and the constant progression of our personnal histories, marked only by meals, telephone conversations, small piles of possessions, fragments against the ruins

Val Williams, Director, London Research centre for photography and the Archive