About

The short version:
“Darkroom dwelling photographer, knitwear designer, evolving elder with intermittent teenage tendencies. Coffee, black, one sugar.”

The longer version:
A recent graduate of one of the north-east’s proliferating photography degrees, recently described by an industry insider “like a carpet warehouse”. Emerging relatively unscathed from these years surrounded by twenty-somethings, and now looking at who runs the best MAs and where. Dissertation themes would focus on the psychogeography of one former mining village on the NE coast.

There is a nascent collaborative Photography Project at Number Seven, with proper darkroom, and some progress with the production of lith prints for sale and as archive prints documenting changes in the area. There is also serious applied contemplation of that oft-suggested year with one camera, one fixed lens and a brick of black and white film from China. If not a whole year, a film a week for six months might do it: 24 or 25 contact sheets.

In other news, some older collaborations fall apart, as they inevitably seem to do sooner or later, and many new ones roll blithely along. There is music and song, the handmade pledge, and the best of best old friends stick around through it all, whatever the weather.

In your list of 100 Things to Do Before I Die, was one of them Sing Carmina Burana? Delightedly, here it is, 13th June 2009, one of 4 or 5 full-volume second altos, the one with the middle England accent:

Ongoing projects are going to be profiled on these pages in the coming weeks, including the silver gelatin and the lith prints, with their little sister digital copies. Memorial books. Back yards. Community autobiography. Private mini-gardens, tinkering, storing, smoking, supping places. Some old and some new work too.

You can comment here or there, or email me, or better still, say it in less than 140 characters if you would like me to take your photograph, or photograph your house or business premises, or if you want a print, or a book, or a licence, whatever it is. Be good to hear from you.