I’ve returned to my roots, taking the time to re-examine who I am and what interests me. It seems that at the core of it all not much has changed, I am passionate about pictures and curious about people and their lives.  I have a love for a story and fascinated by what so many would consider the ordinary and I think will soon disappear.


I am presently working on a documentary story about the Lea Bridge Road in London. What is also fascinating to me is how to present this content.


In order to attempt to answer this question I felt that I had to look back to move forward. Nearly 40 years on I re-imagined my 1983 story of 19-year-old Rag & Bone man George Norris as he took to the streets of Hull again, but this time with his 82-year-old father. I edited and mixed 1980’s black & white images with 2022 digital colour stills, video, audio and text. I recently experimented with using medium format black & white film mixed with video to tell the story ‘A Portrait of the High Street’ that looks at the hopes and fears of shop keepers post Covid and facing the onslaught of online shopping.


A fast-paced start to 2023 with my solo exhibition titled ‘New Town Youth 1985’ in Peterborough Museum & Art Gallery that documents diverse youth groups. At the same time my portrait story that captured overheard snippets of conversation between couples walking during Covid lockdown in 2021, titled ‘Overheard in Lockdown’. These exhibited in Epping Forest where the pictures were taken, two years to the day when the British government announced the ‘roadmap’ out of lockdown.


As a bit of background, I worked at Reuters for over twenty years, first as an international news photographer based in London covering news and sport around the globe, then as Chief Photographer Asia, shaping the news coverage of a diverse region. Back in London I managed 'The Wider Image', co-ordinating and mentoring photographers globally to produce in-depth long form visual stories, at the same time driving picture content on Reuters Instagram and Twitter feeds. Finally, I ran the Middle East and Africa, managing a team of photographers and editors, pursuing sensitive news coverage of a turbulent and often dangerous region.


Before all that I went to art school in Hull where I discovered my passion for photography. Inspired by my tutor, internationally renowned documentary photographer Daniel Meadows, I worked on documentary stories around the Hessle Road area.

To sum it all up, I love taking pictures of people, listening to them and visually telling their stories as they would like them to be told.

 

 

 

 

Recently Cafe Royal Books have published the second of three planned books from my documentary photography stories shot in Hull during the early 1980's. The second book titled 'Star & Garter, Hull 1983' documents the lunctime drinkers in the Hessle Road pub, known locally as Rayners, that was once the heart of the fishing community. The first book, Rag and Bone documents the working life of George Norris, a 19-year-old rag and bone man, who is following in the footseps of generations before him. You can see the video here when I reshot George nearly 40 years later.