Spitting: Photographs by Andrew Bruce and Anna Fox

One of the most popular television programmes of the 1980s and 1990s, watched by an audience of 15 million people at its peak, Spitting Image was a British satirical show featuring puppet caricatures of prominent celebrities of the time, including international politicians and the British Royal Family, among others. The series was cancelled in 1996, but remains a seminal piece of British television. It has recently been announced that a brand new six-part series, entitled Newzoids and featuring modern-day personalities such as Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage and Russell Brand, will air in 2015.

On the termination of the original series, James Hyman began to acquire some of the most important puppets used in the show for his private art collection, the Hyman Collection. A life-long fan of Spitting Image, Hyman believes that the life-size puppets should continue to be seen and enjoyed, and is delighted to be collaborating with photographers Fox and Bruce to bring these politicians back into the public eye in this important election year.

Echoing the garish photographs made by Spitting Image creators Peter Fluck and Roger Law before Martin Lambie-Nairn approached them to suggest adapting their creations for television, Fox and Bruce spent weeks in the studio working with a selection of the original puppets, crafting these ominous images. Photographed either against brightly coloured neon backdrops or shrouded by darkness, each image depicts a former Tory party member. Rendered in extraordinary detail on large format film, at times stripped of their clothing, every mark on the latex or foam is made visible and accentuated, including signs of wear, fragility and decay. Presented in this way, the puppets become evocative emblems of a past era and a faded power. There is an awkward tension in these photographs between the puppets as depiction of people, as cultural icons and also as crumbling modern artefacts. Key works in the exhibition include Margaret Thatcher, her predecessor Edward Heath and successor John Major, and cabinet ministers Cecil Parkinson, Norman Tebbit, Michael Heseltine, Leon Brittan and Douglas Hurd.