William Ellis – The One LP Project

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. 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

The project, conceived in the jazz world has been extended and now includes around 400 people in a spectrum of occupations in the creative milieu – artists, academics, broadcasters, film makers, musicians, music fans, photographers, record producers and writers. For this specially compiled exhibition at Trongate 103, there will be over 120 portraits and interviews on display, including some which are featured in a chapter of a new book entitled Rethinking Miles Davis, published by Oxford University Press in the year of the centenary of Miles Davis’ birth.