Welcome to my site
I hope you enjoy browsing through this collection of photographs taken in different locations around the globe. The pictures are not the work of a professional photographer. I spent most of my life producing and directing TV documentaries. Wherever I went, I took my two Nikon FM cameras. It was usual for me to conduct a recce prior to the arrival of the Film Crew. It was on those recces that most of these pictures were taken.
The nature of documentary-making, particularly in distant lands, demands that you win the trust and respect of the people you are there to film. In return for that trust, you gain access to people, places and events that most travellers will probably not see. From time to time I was lucky enough to have such intimate access and that allowed me to make many of the photographs collected here. I would like to express my gratitude to all those people from many communities around the world, who allowed me to make these pictures of them and their lives.
My Career
I was born in the small East Riding of Yorkshire town of Hornsea on the east coast of England. After attending a Catholic grammar schooI in Hull I was fortunate enough to win a place at Cambridge University to study History. In the winter of 1969/70 I went on a six-week tour of the the United States by the Oxford & Cambridge Shakespeare Company. We performed Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night at universities and colleges including Yale, Harvard, Hunter College New York and George Washington University in Washington DC. Cambridge and that tour of America changed my life forever. After graduation in 1970 I became an advertising copywriter with the world’s two biggest ad agencies, Ogilvy & Mather and J Walter Thompson in London.
In 1974 I left advertising to spend two summers living on the Greek islands. I was poor but very happy! Upon my return to England I managed to break into the closed world of television by getting a job as a promotions scriptwriter at Granada TV in Manchester. By now I knew I wanted to be a film-maker but it took me a while to achieve that ambition. Granada told me I would never be a director for them – an irony I particularly relished in 2003 when I returned to the company as a freelance Producer/Director in the Factual Programmes Department! By 1978 I was a Researcher. My great friend and patron Norman Swallow sent me off to Cold War and communist Poland to research a film about Christianity. I visited Auschwitz on that trip. By the time I returned to the UK I knew that documenting the real world and real people would be my passion. After leaving Granada in 1980 I achieved my ambition to produce and direct documentaries at ATV in Birmingham. That same year I bought my first Nikon stills camera.
For the next 26 years I made films around the world and whenever I could I shot still photos of the people and places my film work took me to.
The Photographs
All the photographs on this site are my copyright and that copyright will be rigorously protected.
All the photos are available for purchase. Please visit the Gallery to peruse. If you should have any special requirements re image size etc I will do my best to accommodate them.
The photographs are also available for publication and for valid commercial use, subject to my approval of that use. Please use the on-site contact form to send me a message and be sure to quote both the photo name and the photo id of the picture(s) you are interested in.
All the images on this site were shot on 35mm film and have been digitally scanned. This allows me to create files of varying sizes depending on your requirements.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Will Atkinson and Timi Shiyanbade of Atkinsons Accountants' I.T. division in Kingston-upon-Hull, who have taken a great deal of time and trouble to create this website for me. They have shown endless patience in the face of my pitiful lack of knowledge of the workings of information technology! I wouldn’t be writing this now if it wasn’t for these two generous and resourceful web developers. Be sure to contact them if you need your own site!!
Thank you once again for visiting,