Stuart Griffiths - Albania Before the Collapse

Silverhill Press Photography

Stuart Griffiths (born 1972) is a British photographer living in Hastings, East Sussex. He published photographs from his time in the Parachute Regiment, The Myth of the Airborne Warrior (2011) and wrote about that period later in Pigs’ Disco (2013). Griffiths has had a solo-touring exhibition, Closer, shown at Phoenix Gallery, Brighton, London College of Communication and MAC, Birmingham. His work is held in the collection of the Imperial War Museums. In 2015, Griffiths began his PhD scholarship at Ulster University and was awarded his Doctorate in 2021.

'Towards the end of 1996 I was on my second year of my editorial photography degree course in Brighton. I visited a friend who worked for a magazine called War Report. He talked about Albania and how it had opened its doors to tourism, after many years of being isolated under Communist rule.

...Shortly after I returned back from Albania in early January 1997, the Albanian Civil War had begun, having been sparked by pyramid scheme failures in Albania soon after its transition to a market economy.'

52 pages of photographs and texts

Currently out of print