Open Eye Gallery presents Saturday Town

Every day is Saturday when it comes to an exhibition opening at Liverpool’s Open Eye Gallery today.

Saturday Town features images captured by photographer Casey Orr in more than 20 cities up and down the country, including Liverpool.

It is being staged at the Mann Island gallery until May 18.

Saturday Town started in 2013 as Saturday Girl, when Orr began to photograph young women in Leeds on Saturday afternoons and exploring what it meant in terms of culture, tribe identities and values and how these things were shown in the unspoken language of fashion and bodily self-expression. 

Following that, the American-born, Leeds-based photographer and lecturer – and member of the feminist art collective The Erotic Power of F= - took her studio on the road throughout the UK, visiting a host of cities and photographing more than 800 people.

Saturday Town won the prestigious Format Festival Award in 2019, and in 2021 it was published, as Saturday Girl, by Liverpool's Bluecoat Press. It remains an on-going project

Orr says: “Liverpool women just blew me away with their style. The Liverpool aesthetic of wearing curlers in your hair whilst out shopping on a Saturday afternoon is just so playful and expressive, saying to the world: ‘I’m going out tonight!’.”

Above: A Liverpool sitter in giant rollers. Photo by Casey Orr. Top: Saturday Town is at Open Eye Gallery until May 18.

Bronwyn Andrews, Open Eye creative producer and exhibition assistant curator, adds: “Are we different now? How do you picture yourself? How does it feel to belong, or rebel? What makes you feel like you? 

“Saturday Town acts as a mosaic of youth subculture, fashion-dialects and self-expression in the north of England over the last 11 years.

“Open Eye Gallery are thrilled to host Casey Orr’s first retrospective and platform the unique fashion and visual language of the north, highlighting young people’s identities and style as culturally significant.

"We’re delighted to facilitate conversations around belonging, identity, community and self-representation through this work.”

Saturday Town is at Open Eye Gallery until May 18.