Benny Profane

Benny Profane is drawn from a long term engagement with a dockland district that Grant first knew as a labourer in his youth. Bound by a few square miles at the edge of the River Mersey, it dwells on the river's hinterland and, in particular, the vast expanse of the Bidston Moss, to become an immersion into one area and those who depended upon it. It is an involved and tender body of work, an account of kinship and defiance in a difficult land. The photographs in the book were taken between 1989 and 1997, and although few of these images were included in Reportage magazine in 1991, a majority are previously unpublished. 

Ken Grant’s photography is characterised by slow and deliberate series made in the Northwest of England. The title, borrowed from a character in Thomas Pynchon’s novel V, refers to a man embarked on a precarious odyssey that takes him between goodness and profanity. Those photographed navigate their own journeys towards some kind of stability in an era when little was. Moving through the Moss, the docklands, its overflows and the edges of the town itself, Benny Profane is a sustained account of an area and those who shaped it during its last years. In 1995, operations at Bidston Moss ceased and the former landfill is now part of a nature reserve.