Member Since January 12th, 2009
Based in Rome. Main photographic specialisations are still life, landscape, people and architecture.
When I was young there was nothing I enjoyed more than painting, drawing or snapping away with my grandfather’s Kodak Brownie. So when I was at school my ambition was to be an artist in some way or another. But the real world kicked in, people advised against such a precarious type of career and so my first five working years were spent as an apprentice lithographer, in which the only tenuous link to photography was the platemaking process, where the negatives of maritime charts were exposed under a vacuum onto zinc plates coated with a light sensitive chemical solution to produce a positive image. From which the final chart would be printed onto paper.
But all these charts gave me a longing to go to sea, and so after completing my apprenticeship I signed up with the Royal Navy for four years, and saw a lot of sea.
In all this time I had always been taking photographs, but on leaving the Navy I was still no nearer to becoming a photographer. A succession of jobs lasting only a few months convinced me to change tack and make a move towards realising my ambition to make photography my career; and in 1980 I enrolled in a photography and design course at Newcastle College of Arts in the North East of England.
That opened up a whole new vision as to what photography could be and moving to London after the course I started working as a photograph’s assistant, and in ’86 finally started on my own, in a studio in central London, shooting for advertising agencies, magazines and design groups and architects. I made up my mind at college that still life was what I wanted to do prevalently. I loved the way you could buitd a set and light it just as you wanted, unhurriedly, stepping back, evaluating every step to get the feel right. Of course, when it’s a job you’re doing then you have to go a bit faster!
I now live in Rome, Italy, and have shot a lot more besides still life images. Among which cars, banks, boats and restaurants, Bernini statues in the Borghese Gallery in Rome, politicians, film stars and writers, and a scooter in the Trevi Fountain.
When I shoot landscape, it’s not always the famous monuments or classic scenery that attracts me, but the little out of the way places, personal, with a history of ordinary people, which tell a story that we feel belongs to us all. Likewise a still life is a frozen moment in time of some ones life. Everyday objects seen as an intrinsic part of somebody’s personality.