In 2009, Lisa Barnard was granted access to 32 Smith Square, the abandoned London headquarters of the Conservative Party, and photographed the empty rooms, stained carpets, peeling paintwork and discarded political iconography left behind. The building, once a stage for power, had become a quiet interior of corporate blue and slow decay. Chateau Despair, published by GOST Books in 2013, gathers that work into a 96-page hardback with silkscreened and foil-stamped cloth binding. Essays by Jeremy Till and Sarah James accompany the photographs, placing the images in architectural and political context and extending the book’s inquiry beyond documentation.
Barnard’s approach is patient and architectural. She records the residue of institutional life — the colour schemes, the wear, the objects that outlasted their purposes — without nostalgia or spectacle. The result is a study of political theatre after the performance has ended, and of the ways a building retains the memory of its occupants. The sequencing moves through the site as a charged interior, letting the reader read the rooms as much as the photographs.
Chateau Despair was made at a moment when the Conservative Party had long since left Smith Square, and its subject is the gap between the rhetoric of power and the material rooms that housed it. That distance gives the book its distinctive tone: not a portrait of politicians, but of the architecture and leftovers of a political machine. The design — cloth, silkscreen, foil — treats the book as an object equal to the subject, and the essays frame the photographs as a considered project rather than a news assignment.
For collectors of contemporary photographic books, Chateau Despair is notable for its focus, its physical making, and its collaboration between photographer and writers. It sits within a tradition of photographic studies of architecture and institutional space, and its images of an emptied party headquarters remain a precise record of a specific place and political moment. The book rewards attention to sequence, surface and detail rather than to spectacle.
