Biography

Born in Stockton on Tees in 1970 and moved to Hull in 1976, my first experience with photography was via Tom a friend and neighbour of my parents, Tom introduced me to black and white Photography, he would photograph his son and me playing in our street.

I left school at 16, and went on to study fine art at evening classes, I soon changed from paintbrush to camera and the paint became the film. I first started taking pictures while racing bicycles back in the late 1980’s, I wanted to capture key moments in cycle races, my initial impulse to pick up the camera was just to document something that was a part of my life. Once a year the Milk Race would finish in Hull; a Pro-Am cycle race sponsored by the Milk Marketing Board.

By the late 90’s I had moved to London, I needed to know what life was like beyond Humberside. I was working as a freelance design… waiting for the big photographic opportunity. I was working on a government project called Y2K bug; The Millennium Project: When complex computer programs were first written in the 60s, engineers used a two-digit code for the year, leaving out the "19." As the year 2000 approached, many believed that the systems would not interpret the "00" correctly, therefore causing a major glitch in the system. This was real end of the world stuff, I started documenting everything, especially my local high streets, and such things as Millennium clear-ways which where painted on major routes across London to allow emergency vehicles access when the system failed at the strike of midnight! It was essential I photographed everyday, I was keen to document the day to day, I had been influenced by the School of Humanist photography; mid 20th century photographers such as Dorothea Lange, Robert Frank and Walker Evans, I felt it was my duty to capture the every-day, the mundane, the normal or ignored.

Commercial success came late; aged 47 – I finally made it as a commercial photographer, working on commercials, I love the collaboration, the rapport and the trust that is established when I take a photograph of someone. I’m interested in what people are doing and what they do. I’m obsessed with what I see, I do my best to engage with the world to see what’s really happening. I have a deep sense of responsibility to document the realities of everyday life, looking for the unusual, the day-to-day, the mundane, or ignored. I am at home on the street, day or night, currently based in Hackney, London, still my biggest inspiration.