I am a socially engaged documentary photographer.
I have been working on a place-based meditation on Bartlemas hamlet in Oxford, including allotments, abandoned nursery, and the ancient leper hospital, chapel and surrounds, with Prof Ian Forrest of Glasgow University. A photobook Bartlemas: Oxford’s hidden sanctuary is due for publication in October 2025 to mark the 900th anniversary of its foundation which was in 1126. It will be accompanied by an exhibition at Caper Books from 1-9 November 2025 as part of Photo Oxford.
My previous project was the ‘We Are Divinity Road’ Photo Project. This has now wrapped up with an exhibition in May 2022 on the outside walls of the Co-op store on the street. A section of it ‘A street in a global pandemic’ is my first on-line exhibition, hosted by the University of Birmingham-based Arts of Place. The LSE also wrote up as part of the urbanism blog series.
The Covid19 pandemic has had a huge impact on all our lives and I spent a year (May 2020-April 2021) documenting individuals responses to a collective challenge through their wearing of masks.
A second photobook published in October 2021 is a documentary of the English Worker Co-operative Movement 1980s, published by Cafe Royal Books. It is part of their project to make accessible black and white documentary photography from that era. Some of those pictures are in a panel on the right, along with a couple of reviews of the book. I was also part of a group exhibition celebrating the work of Cafe Royal Books at the Martin Parr Foundation, Bristol, April – June 2022 entitled Documentary, zines and subversion. An updated version exhibited at the Stills Gallery Edinburgh from November 2023. I have contributed over 120 photographs from that period to the National Co-operative Archive in Manchester.
One of my photos was a prizewinner in the Martin Parr Foundation competition ‘Time capsule 2020’ summarising for viewers of the future, the summer of 2020 in a single shot.
‘I like these two people in their masks who are very socially engaged with each other. So that works well… We’ve got two of the main themes of the year together in one photo. Good shot.’
Martin Parr
Over the years I have contributed photographs to newspapers and magazines including The Guardian, New Internationalist and Camerawork (the now-famous 1981 issue on Ireland) and a range of radical publications including Big Flame, Freedom, Peace News, and Red Pepper, as well broadcast media including the BBC. I have specialised on environmental and sustainability themes for both Environmental Images and Photofusion picture agencies. I’m a photography volunteer for Asylum Welcome. The blogger ‘Morris Oxford‘ identified me as one of the 10 photographers in Oxford to watch in November 2023.
I am also revisiting my archive of b/w photos from the 1970s and 1980s. i will gradually expand the number of collections posted. I like to feel that there is a thread of ‘humanitarian optimism’ running through my work.
The Bhopal Medical Appeal (BMA) has published an archive of 73 of my photos from the time I was working there in 1986. They are published for the first time and are part of the commemoration of the disaster at Bhopal in December 1984.
I have worked with Prof Florence Boos of the University of Iowa to add around 70 photographs I took in Faroe and Iceland in 2013 and 2017 to the on-line edition of William Morris’s Icelandic Journals. You can view them here.
I have no formal photographic training, though I did do a post grad degree in Film Studies at PCL in the late 1970s. I am a member of the Royal Photographic Society and the co-convenor of the Oxford Photographer’s Group.
I retain the copyright on all my photographs, both on this site and elsewhere.