I take photographs and make videos because this excites, interests and satisfies me more than anything else I know.
I was born in Liverpool in 1967. My father was an architect, and he designed the house we lived in. We were Catholics, and I went to a local grammar school that taught ancient Greek and got boys into the University of Oxford.
In my early teens I wanted to be an astronomer and read all I could about it. Then I took up rowing at Liverpool Victoria Rowing Club, and as a single sculler won junior events at three National Championships, but twice tried and failed to get into the national team for the Junior World Championships. I fell out of love with science and in with language, art, music and theatre, though I also discovered I had no talent for playing music.
In 1985 I went to Keble College, Oxford, to study ancient Greek and Latin literature and philosophy. At Oxford I rowed for the university reserve crew, Isis, in my first year, winning our race against the Cambridge reserves. The following year I rowed in an under-23 eight for Leander Club that was selected to represent Great Britain at the Match des Seniors, an international competition for that age class, and won. After that, I lost interest in racing and gave rowing up.
Now that my life was no longer dominated by rowing, I took up student drama, briefly, student journalism and photography, but didn't do enough studying, and left university in 1989 with a 2:2 degree.
For a few years I earned a living from photography and teaching: taking photographs at dress rehearsals of student plays and selling prints to the actors; working at The Photographers’ Workshop, a darkroom and studio hire centre, instructing members on developing and printing black and white and colour film and on using the studio, and developing and printing photographs for clients; and teaching Greek, Latin and English as a foreign language. I had an exhibition of my photographs called Early Starings at The Photographers’ Workshop.
In 1991 I moved to London, decided I would not be able to make a living as a photographer and so took a job as a sub-editor on Accountancy Age newspaper. I applied unsuccessfully to do an MA in photography at the Royal College of Art. I produced two series of photographs, Monuments – a collaboration with my friend Stephen Sharkey, who wrote poems to match the pictures – and Numina, and showed them in Oxford at The Photographers’ Workshop.
In 1993 and 1994 I spent nine months in Greece teaching English, then spent about five months visiting Tanzania, Australia and Hawaii. I came back to London to work on an adaptation of Solaris as an opera with my friend Michael Oliva: I wrote the libretto and produced video projection backdrops, he wrote the music. Meanwhile I worked as a freelance sub-editor. Solaris became Ocean after we failed to get the rights to adapt the original novel by Stanislaw Lem, and then was shelved after we failed to get funding.
As well as sub-editing, I worked as an exhibition installation technician for a while. I also helped the film-makers Breda Beban and Hrvoje Horvatic as a script editor.
I made a couple of short Super 8 films and in 1998 went to do a part-time degree in art at Central St Martin’s College of Art and Design. After an unfortunate excursion into painting I stuck with photography, film and video, branching out into performance and installations. Outside college, I continued to do video projections for theatre. I learned a lot and developed as an artist at Central St Martin’s, but my time there ended badly in 2003 when I was awarded my second 2:2 after making an installation for my degree show of which I was rather proud.
From 2000 to 2003 I taught photography, computer graphics and video production at Greenwich and Hackney Community Colleges, while continuing to freelance as a sub, mostly for New Scientist and Nature.
In 2003 I married Lara Pawson, and the following year we went to Ivory Coast for three months and then Mali for five more: she as a BBC correspondent, I as a freelance photojournalist. I sold a fair number of pictures to the international agencies and spent three weeks in the Sahara filming Tuareg nomads for a documentary. This became With the Nomads, which was first shown at the Ritzy cinema in Brixton as part of the Institut Français Mosaïques festival in 2006.
I returned to freelance subbing until 2007, when Lara and I went to South Africa for eleven months. While there I worked with the photographer Roger Ballen on a speculative project, and pursued various photographic and video projects of my own: the first one to be finished is the photobook Melville, and there are plenty more in the works. Meanwhile I am working as the online sub for New Scientist, and writing posts for the CultureLab section of the New Scientist website. I live in Walthamstow, on the north-eastern fringe of Victorian London.
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