“All photographs – not only those that are so called ‘documentary’…can be fortified by words.”
– Dorothea Lange
I’m a freelance photographer and writer based in the North West of the UK with experience in portraiture and documentary photojournalism. I was previously an academic, an Associate Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at Bradford University. I have worked on a range of social, academic, artistic and commercial projects and welcome commissions in all of these areas.
I am a member of Luneside Artists Studios, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and the Royal Geographical Society.
Over the last two years I have been working on two long term projects. One documenting ‘change’ in Longyearbyen, Svalbard, the northernmost community in the world and the other working with a touring Circus to document their experiences of performance, identity and community.
In February 2020 I was awarded the AP Magazine / MPB inaugural ‘Rising Star’ bursary for my photographic work documenting change in the high Arctic.
A little more about this website…
One of the most celebrated photographs of the 20th Century is Stuart Franklin’s photograph of a lone protester, standing defiantly before a row of tanks during the events of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. Franklin coined the term the ‘documentary impulse’ in his book of the same name, which eloquently describes the history of photography in modern society, and reflects upon the compulsion to document our lives, and the ways in which this allows us to reflect on both ‘moral and ‘material’ truths.
Franklin’s work has been an inspiration for me, alongside Robert Cappa, Don McCullin, Tom Stoddart, Vivien Maier, Lee Miller and many other photojournalists, artists and documentary photographers. Whilst my previous academic work focused on issues of peace and conflict and I continue to have an interest in conflict and war photography, my own photography is concerned with the connections between the everyday and the extraordinary, the journeys, moments, places and people that challenge us to think about change, resilience, community and possibility.