Commissioning new work has been at the heart of Photoworks’s approach and its identity as an organization for nearly fifteen years. And it is Photoworks’s view that a collaborative way of working considerably enriches each aspect of the commissioning process. This book documents and reflects on a project that amply demonstrated that collaborative spirit. It looks back at our work with Glyndebourne Education from 2004 to 2007, which provided the basis for the making of Sophy Rickett and Ed Hughes’s beautiful film, Auditorium (2007), and that reinforced for us the importance of process as an end in itself, something to be considered as part of the success and legacy of a project. Auditorium presents an unprecedented impression of Glyndebourne as a pared down, even minimal architectural and mechanical space, a machine geared to the production of operatic performance, yet one that has its own life, its own structures, rhythms, echoes and shadow plays.

The film is a compelling blend of photography, film and music, and it is a dialogue between those art forms, an exchange, that reflects Rickett and Hughes’s mutual interest in modernism, but that also mirrors the relationship between Photoworks and Glyndebourne and their different areas of work.