Murray Ballard embarked on a degree in furniture and product design before realising that learning about the chemical properties of plastic held little interest for him. At this point he jumped ship and switched to an art foundation course where he duly discovered something much more exciting. He graduated from the University of Brighton in 2007 with a degree in Photography. The following year he was selected for Fresh Faced and Wild Eyed 08 – the annual showcase of work by the ‘most promising recent graduates’ at The Photographers’ Gallery, London. In 2011 the British Journal of Photography recognised him as an ‘emerging photographer of note’, following his debut solo show at Impressions Gallery, Bradford, The Prospect of Immortality, which took as its subject the strange, marginal world of cryonics: the process of storing a dead body by freezin ...