Writings
Cause for Concern
In October 1969 following a report from the Institute for Race Relations regarding the media’s approach to issues of race and immigration in Britain Photography magazine commissioned me to write about how I had dealt with this as the photographer who had illustrated two landmark articles on the subject in The Observer newspaper.
Can British Photography Emerge from the Dark Ages?
Thomas Joshua Cooper and I were teaching colleagues at Trent Polytechnic in Nottingham in the 1970s and were dismayed at some of the outmoded ideas in most photographic courses and held by some photographic commentators in the UK then. We decided to send our provocative critique to The Guardian newspaper illustrated with our students’ photographs. They declined to publish our article and lost the photographs as well! Luckily, the editor of Creative Camera heard about this and offered to publish it in September 1974.
Should We Do This and Do It Better?
The famous Arles Festival of Photography in France was started by enthusiasts in 1970. When in 1976 Amateur Photographer learned that I had been invited to speak at the festival they posed this question and commissioned me to try and answer it. Arles was the first photography festival in Europe, and I was later able to draw on my experience when we set up the first one in the UK in Derby.
Apropos: Great Britain
In 1976 Alan Porter, editor of Camera magazine that was published in French, German and English, invited photographers from around the world to write on a photographic topic of their choice. I was the first one and my article was focused on photographic education. It turned out to be more controversial than I anticipated and led to follow up articles and a lively debate in the pages of the British Journal of Photography over many weeks.
Three Perspectives on Photography
In 1979 the Arts Council of Great Britain decided to have a major exhibition of British photography at the prestigious Hayward Gallery on the South Bank, London. They invited three selectors – Angela Kelly, John Tagg and me – to choose a particular photographic practice in the UK that would be represented in my selection by Raymond Moore, Thomas Joshua Cooper, Graham Smith, Martin Parr, Roger Palmer and Brian Griffin. We wrote an article on our respective perspectives in the catalogue.
ANSEL BY HIMSELF
Just before he died in 1984 the legendary Ansel Adams completed his autobiography. When it was published two years later the British Journal of Photography commissioned me to review it, probably because I knew him a bit. During my long association with photography, I think it was one of the very few times I have been asked to do a book review.
Style
Style may be defined as the distinctive treatment of a given subject that is characteristic of a particular photographer, movement or period. (Oxford Companion to the Photograph)
Modernism and the Landscape
The First World War was a cultural as well as a political, social and economic watershed. The modern machine age had arrived, and with it a new non-deferential, democratic era that swept away traditions in favour of progress. Modernism had a profound effect on photography and how photographers ‘saw’ the landscape. (Oxford Companion to the Photograph)
Education – For What?
A conference associated with the legacy of Creative Camera, a prominent British photography magazine, and called What Happened Here? – Photography in Britain since 1968 took place in Bradford in 2004. Other contributors included Bill Jay, Sue Davies, Valerie Williams, David Hurn, Shirley Read and Martin Parr. (National Science and Media Museum)
A Snicket in Halifax
I was in the features department of the Birmingham Post & Mail one evening in 1966 when I saw a review copy of a new book by Bill Brandt entitled Shadow of Light and it made me realise how powerful photography could be as a medium of expression.
The One That Got Away
The editor of a British photographic magazine asked several photographers to describe a photograph that they wanted to make but didn’t or couldn’t. (Creative Camera)
How British Photography Found its Voice
The 1970s was, in my opinion, photography’s most important decade of the 20th century. During this period its traditional practices were questioned even undermined, its profile as a medium of creative self-expression was raised immeasurably, and the teaching of the subject changed beyond recognition. (Redeye – the photographic network)
Natural Magic and Moonlight
I was commissioned to write a wide-ranging essay for the Spots of Time catalogue that accompanied an exhibition of photographs of the Lake District at night by Henry Iddon at the Centre for British Romanticism in Grasmere in 2008. (The Wordsworth Trust)
Corridor of Uncertainty
Bereavement, for me, is being between two states: what has been and what may take place in the future, and the work that I have made mirrors that interstice. (University of Bath conference paper)
Dialogue With Legends
When the latest edition of Dialogue with Photography was published in 2025, Amateur Photographer commissioned me to write about the project that Thomas Joshua Cooper and I started in 1974 when we were teaching at Trent Polytechnic. We had set out to interview as many of the major figures in photography then as they neared the end of their careers. The magazine was interested to publish the story of our fascinating journey to complete the project. The first edition of the book was eventually published in 1979 and has been continuously in print since then.