Re-photo

Although I had an interest in photography from an early age and had my first proper camera in my early teens, I couldn’t afford to use it until some ten years later when I started work as a teacher. On my teaching course I did short courses in photography and the newly invented media studies (with one of its inventors.)

My first published work came a couple of years later, with a portfolio in a photographic magazine, pictures from Paris.  They show some of the features and influences that have remained important in my work.

My real photographic education came from a magazine called ‘Creative Camera’, edited by Peter Turner, which introduced me to great photography from around the world, including much contemporary work from the USA. Its best years were the first few years that I was a photographer, and later it went sadly downhill. I was very gratified to have a few of my images in the last of the five fine yearbooks that the magazine published, Creative Camera International 5.

In 1977 I went on the first of a number of photographic workshops with Raymond Moore, a great photographer, but also a superb teacher. Ray’s example and his perceptive prompting took me further along my path, and led to a major museum show in 1983.

I set up my first web site in 1995, and it is still on line, though at a different address. My main sites are now The Buildings of London and London’s Industrial Heritage for my work on buildings and urban landscape (some of which also appears on the Urban Landscape web site) and for more recent photography centred around events in London, My London Diary.

From 1999 to May 2007, my writing on photography mainly appeared on the About Photography site, owned by the New York Times, for which I wrote all the site material during those seven years.

Recent shows in which I have taken part include Another London.