I am a photographer, writer & sustainability campaigner
Since I retired from a career in the sustainable development part of local government I have focussed my creative impulses on photography. My website reflects this later-life direction so there is much greater emphasis on my work as a socially engaged documentary photographer, something I have been on and off for over 40 years. You will find my photo books for sale under Argehane Books.
My interest in the arts, photography sustainability and the local are crystallised both in my work and in my links to the Birmingham University’s Arts of Place network, of which I am proud to be a member.
I am an Asylum Welcome volunteer photographer, do regular shoots for the local Labour and Co-operative Party’s, and for five years to 2025 was Chair of Writers in Oxford.
My family and some history
I have two daughters. My younger daughter Alice has recently moved to China. My older daughter Nadine is living and working in Edinburgh for the City Council Library Service.
I have two sisters. My youngest sister Claudia is a ceramicist. You can catch up on her current and recent exhibitions at her website.
The other artist in my immediate family was my dad’s cousin, Frank Martin (1921-2005). The family has launched a website about his life and a number of his works are for sale through the site.
The family has strong military connections. My uncle Martin Stott was a Royal Marine (having previously been an art student) and was killed aged 22 on the first day of the Battle of Salerno in Italy in September 1943. My great uncle Frank Henry Martin was killed in northern France near the end of WW1 in March 1918 aged 20. My maternal grandfather Abraham (my middle name) served for 30 years in the Royal Navy starting out in 1892 as ‘boy second class’ and ending as a Lieutenant Commander.
The family has Irish connections through him and my mother, Clare Hegarty. The family come from Skibbereen, Co Cork where a local saying has it, ‘Everyone dies when their time is up, except the Hegarty’s who die when they want to.’ The family is notoriously long-lived, and Clare who died in October 2016 aged 94, was no exception. Her last remaining cousin Beatrice, died in 2023 aged 101.