About me

Where words stop

Music can move you without you understanding a single word. You don't need the language; the feeling arrives regardless — a recognition, a sense of being connected for a moment to something larger. That's what photographs are for me: a way of looking closely at the world, and of being moved by what I see.

I came to photography after years as a hospital pharmacist, with a PhD in nuclear medicine and oncology. All that training left the other half of me waiting its turn. Photography is where I go to ask the other questions - not what something is, but what it feels like.

I work in long projects: a hilltop village in Basilicata, the streets of Birmingham where we lived through lockdown, mornings in Shanghai, evenings in Tokyo. Single frames don't add up to what I'm after. Attention takes time. When the Kunsthal in Rotterdam showed my work, the curator wrote that my photographs "seem to breathe, just as taking them is like breathing for him," and called me "an eager observer" whose work, zoomed in or out, "will reveal a kind of visual poetry of light and life, of past and present." Light and life, past and present - that is more or less the whole of it.

Many photographers have shaped how I see: Magnum members such as Trent Parke and Matt Black, and Daido Moriyama. Over the years I have done a number of workshops and mentorships, and those with Jacob Aue Sobol and Michael Ackerman left the deepest mark.

I hope a photograph of mine reaches you the way a song sometimes does, without needing to be explained.

What I changed, and why.

For years my work hung in galleries, at gallery prices. I'm proud of what those years built. But there was always a quiet ache to it: most of the people who stopped in front of my work couldn't afford to take it home. So I've made a deliberate change. My prints are now priced to be lived with - within reach of the people who actually love them. Same photographs, same care, made for many walls instead of a few.