The One LP Project by William Ellis

Exhibition in association with Street Level Photoworks

One LP is a unique and critically-acclaimed portrait photography project that explores the inspirational qualities of recordings and the impact that they have on people’s lives.

The exhibition collection has been touring the world for a number of years in various formats, launching originally in New York, and this version is brought to Dunoon in collaboration with Street Level Photoworks in Glasgow.

Each portrait features the subject holding a recording that is of great personal significance to them.

The photograph is accompanied by a short interview that explores the meaning and value of the selected album. One LP has come to represent a journey into another’s soul: the album that each artist selected is a part of them: their past, present and future.

“The project commenced in 2010 as a response to conversations with musicians about their relationship with the work of other artists encountered via recordings, in particular, conversations that had focused on albums that had profoundly moved the subjects. As a conversation is of course transient – usually committed only to memory – I decided to create a format that would enable me to document my interactions with the artists. The One LP Project is the outcome – something that excavates layers of memory, influence, being and uniqueness.”  William Ellis, 2026

This specially compiled exhibition will feature more than 120 portraits and interviews of predominantly leading jazz artists, as well as reggae artists, record producers, DJs and visual artists photographed in New York, Los Angeles and Jamaica.

Prominent photographers included are Terry O’Neill, Jürgen Schadeberg, Lynn Goldsmith and Bob Gruen. At Glasgow International Jazz Festival, artists photographed include Benny Golson, Carol Kidd, Terence Blanchard, and Warren Vache.

Gregory Porter – One LP: Donny Hathaway ‘Live’ released 1972 “The Donny Hathaway Live album is so special because it captures – with full concentration – the thing that’s special in live performance. That communication, that exchange of audience and artist. There’s back and forth conversation, the women and the men in the audience are screaming things back to Donny and Donny’s of course responding musically – and responding incredibly musically. You can feel the emotion in the room as soon as the needle hits the record. That communication – it’s not just jazz, it’s not just soul, it’s human to human. That exchange between humanity is just beautiful to see. It happens on Donny Hathaway Live.” – Gregory Porter: Band on the Wall, Manchester, 2012

About the photographer

William Ellis (b. Liverpool 1957) is self-taught.

His work has appeared in The Times, The Guardian, New Statesman and on the BBC, magazines and record covers, and at the Grammys.

He is a co-author of the forthcoming book Rethinking Miles Davis published by Oxford University Press.

His photographs have been exhibited in the United States, Canada, Cuba, South Africa, Europe, China and the Far East. They are in numerous private collections and those of National Portrait Gallery, London, the Archive of Contemporary Music, New York, The American Jazz Museum, Kansas City MO, and on display at Birdland, New York.

His reggae project One Love, produced in his role as Visiting Research Fellow in Photographing Popular Music Culture at Birmingham City University is in the archives of the University of the West Indies, Kingston, Jamaica.