Documentary
Photography, 2023.
New documentary photographs from 2023.
Life in Britain as seen and recorded in documentary photos.
As 2023 comes to a close it's time to upload and refresh the website with some new documentary photos from this year's work. I have met and photographed some very interesting people, which has become a standard feature of my practice and one of the reasons I like doing it. The chance to see and record the fleeting moments of life and make records of events is a strong motivator.
2023 saw me swap back to black and white, a return to colour might happen one day, should I ever chance upon a digital camera, but the sourcing of film became a real hassle, in particularly getting the same type of film and retaining a consistent look in the final images was actually impossible.
Here then, in the images below is some of my year, which was spent making documentary photographs of North Devon and my home region, the F.o.D.
Documentary photographs from 2022.
Becoming Elvis is an original project and is an example of social documentary photography applied in an editorial style. These images were made during one meeting of 1 1/2 hours.
Start date 7th Aug'. 2022 (Published in the new print documentary photography magazine, Humanity, created by the CBDP).
With James Burrell. Elvis Tribute.
This work looks at a professional yet highly passionate performer whose specialism is Elvis Presley. I was very lucky to find James Burrell who let me in to see his world, our first meeting was in Petersfield at the Festival Hall. This is an on going documentary project and the images below are from two rolls of film run through the Leica and unusually for me, in this type of work, there are 4 images from my iPhone(!) The photographs work on two levels: A straight documentary of a performer and also as an investigation into our perceptions of ourselves, others and how others perceive us. As Winogrand pointed out, even the camera is a mask and although a little gregarious naturally, James certainly was transformed into another version of himself. He admitted when asked, "Yes - I do feel different".
Hover on the image and then click the arrow to precede through the example of documentary photos.