Nigel Shafran is a self-taught photographer. He started his career as a fashion photographer in New York in the 1980s and has since turned to fine art photography. Shafran's work has been exhibited worldwide and is held in a number of art collections including Nottingham Castle Art Gallery and Museum and the Arts Council Collection. Shafran's work captures the intimacy and mundanity of everyday subjects by developing a narrative through the careful sequencing of images. His photographs are quietly attentive, seeking out the evocative spaces between the obvious and the conventionally illustrative.

Shafran has a close relationship with the V&A and used the Museum as the subject for a series of photographs taken in 1999. This new body of work, taken fifteen years later, complements the existing images and visually charts the development of the museum over this period. Moreover, the series has historical significance as it provides an interesting contrast to earlier 19th century representations of the South Kensington Museum that are held in the collection.

Shafran was commissioned by the museum to take a series of photographs for the V&A’s Annual Report 2013/14. The photographs offer an alternative view of the museum building, its staff and visitors. The photographs are a combination of the familiar and the unfamiliar. The photographs record everyday scenes that offer an honest and recognisable narrative; from a tray of used crockery on an empty table in the museum café to a group of schoolchildren on an educational visit. Shafran’s photographs offer a glimpse into the many roles adopted by the museum and provide a candid representation of museum life, one that provides an interesting contrast to earlier representations carried out by museum photographers including Charles Thurston Thompson and Isabel Cowper.