Documentary Photography • Youth Culture • Scotland and Northern Ireland • 2004–ongoing
Toby Binder is a German documentary photographer based between Germany and Argentina. Born in Esslingen in 1977, he studied communication design at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart. His long-term projects examine social, environmental and political conditions through everyday experience, frequently from the perspective of children and young people.
Binder began photographing in Scotland in 2004 as part of his degree project. Working in Glasgow and Edinburgh, he documented young people, street football and everyday life in working-class communities. These photographs developed into Youth of the UK, a wider study of young people in former industrial towns and cities.
Binder first photographed in Belfast in 2006. Following the United Kingdom’s 2016 referendum on European Union membership, he returned and concentrated on young people living in Protestant–unionist and Catholic–nationalist communities. The resulting work was published as Wee Muckers – Youth of Belfast by Kehrer Verlag in 2019 and has continued as a long-term document of youth in the city.
British Culture Archive represents selected photographs from Binder’s British work for print editions and image licensing.