Bio

1969 was the year in which I was born, in a small industrial town on the northwest coast of England. My school years were a tedious affair and I escaped with only my artistic skills and no other qualifications. I had no formal training in art, but from a young age exhibited a natural artistic ability. Drawing, painting, and sculpture came easy to me compared with my academic work.
After leaving school, I drifted through various careers with no direction. Only later on in life and approaching thirty did I find photography as a creative option. I discovered photography through my first passion cinema. I had always wanted to be involved in the movie business and tell stories through moving pictures, but living in a small town and having no film schools gave me no opportunities to follow my dreams. My father had once dabbled in still photography, and luckily kept some 35mm equipment lying around. I had always loved movie stills and found a single picture could tell many stories.

Still photography was going to be the next best thing to my movie ambition and with my fathers camera I began to take photographs. In the beginning my photographs were merely snaps and fairly bland, but with the help of a friend I learned to ’see’ and understand how to create an image. He helped me find beauty in the simplest of things. From then on a new passion was born, a passion which created new and exciting possibilities. Still photography soon took over my movie interests and gave me a thirst for photographic imagery. My early work was influenced by people like David Bailey and Richard Avedon. Later, Bob Carlos Clarke, Albert Watson and Emil Schildt had an effect on me.

I like quite stark, minimalist images and I’ve tried to achieve this in my work. I was never looking for glossy images covered in sugar, they lack any kind of depth or reality for me. I preferred shape and form and black and white does this perfectly. The subject in my eyes almost becomes a visual sculpture.