Private Stuart Griffiths

Stuart Griffiths (born 1972) is a British photographer and writer living in Hastings, East Sussex. He published photographs from his time in the Parachute Regiment in The Myth of the Airborne Warrior (2011) and wrote about that period and later in Pigs' Disco (2013). Griffiths has had a solo exhibition, CLOSER at Mac Birmingham and his work is held in the collection of the Imperial War Museum. In 2022 Griffiths was awarded his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Ulster.

Life and work:

Griffiths is from North West England. He was born in Manchester and grew up on its outskirts. The family later moved to Warrington where he spent his teenage years.

He joined 14 Platoon Junior Parachute Company at age 16, spending five years in the Parachute Regiment, he was deployed as part of Operation Banner in Northern Ireland with 3 Para where he served in HQ Company as a barman in the Sergeants Mess, then joined 4 Platoon, B Company and later became a unit battalion photographer for the Int Cell, D Company. He left the Regiment in 1993, aged 21 and moved to Brighton, East Sussex. In 1993/94 he attended outdoor illegal rave / free parties around Brighton, which he photographed. From 1994 he studied for a BA in Editorial Photography at the University of Brighton graduating in 1997. The flowing year, Griffiths was working as a photographer in the Democratic Republic of the Congo where he was caught up in the August 1998 civil war, where he was imprisoned. 

In 2000, Griffiths was homeless and jobless in London, sleeping in doorways until moving into an ex-forces hosel in east London. While living at the hostel he worked as a  paparazzi photographer. In the late 2000s, Griffiths worked for Vice on stories about gang culture with the crime author Graham Johnson then stories on the marching season in Belfast, drug addictions in Siberia first where he worked with other journalists.

The 2009 documentary film Isolation directed by Luke Seomore and Joseph Bull follows Griffiths as he journeys through England encountering ex-soldiers experiencing the physical and emotional scars of life after the Army. The film premiered at the Edinburgh Film Festival then toured the UK at Picturehouse Cinemas.

The photographs of The Myth of the Airborne Warrior (2011) ‘Were taken on a compact Canon secreted in his webbing while he was serving as a paratrooper with the British Army in Northern Ireland in the late Eighties and early Nineties’, The Guardian wrote that ‘The photographs ... often look snatched or have been taken from a distance so that the housing estates and streets of tribally divided, working-class Belfast look even bleaker and more threatening than they are. He captures his fellow Paras at rest and at play ... The small book has little context save for Griffiths's own first-person text, which has been heavily edited in black marker to highlight the most shocking anecdotes in direct contrast with the mundanity of the images. ... An odd little book, then, of one soldier's willfully unprofessional but curiously revealing photographs – but an evocative one for that very reason’.

Pigs' Disco (2013) contains writing with accompanying photographs and illustrations. It ‘Juxtaposes the grim and gritty reality of life as a British soldier stationed in Northern Ireland during the Troubles with images of the nascent rave scene and drug use in the British Army’, as well as of later life in Brighton.

Dr. Stuart Griffiths currently lives in East Sussex with his wife. He has two grown up children and works as a researcher for Professor Helen Parr at the school of sociology at Keele University in conjunction with the National Army Museum in London. In 2024/2025 a completed trilogy of books titled  The Glory of War are being published as E-books by Yellow Press.