Born in 1941 in Ludlow, Shropshire, Paul Hill worked as a newspaper reporter from the late 1950s until he became a freelance photographer in 1965. As a photojournalist he worked for the Birmingham Post & Mail, The Guardian, The Observer, The Telegraph Magazine, and the BBC, amongst others.

Paul Hill interviewing the Beatles, 1963

He became a full-time lecturer in photography at Trent Polytechnic, Nottingham in 1974 where he was later appointed head of the trend-setting Creative Photography course. Another notable achievement around this time was the establishment, with his wife, Angela, of The Photographers’ Place, the UK’s first residential photography workshop – at their Peak District home.

The Photographers Place first workshop, 1976

Since the 1970s Paul has exhibited regularly throughout the British Isles, Europe, North America, Japan and Australasia, and is co- author (with Thomas J. Cooper) of Dialogue with Photography (1979/2025), Approaching Photography (1982/2021), and White Peak Dark Peak (1990) and Corridor of Uncertainty (2010). His work resides in the art collections of, amongst others, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, Bradford; Arts Council England; Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, Stockholm; Australian National Gallery, Canberra; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and Cleveland Museum of Art in the USA.

A member of the Arts Council’s first photography committee in the mid 1970s, he helped set up the first Derby Festival of Photography in 1991(later FORMAT) and was a director of East Midlands Arts for four years during the 1990s.

A major influence on contemporary British photography, he was made a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society in 1990 and, four years later, was awarded an MBE by The Queen for services to photography.

Between 1995 and 2010 he was a professor at De Montfort University, Leicester, and set up the MA in Photography course there in 1996, which was of the first of its type in Britain. The Library of Birmingham, which houses one of the country’s major collections of photographs, acquired the Paul Hill/ Photographers’ Place Archive in 2004. He was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Fine Art by Derby University in 2011 and by De Montfort University in 2012.

In 2016 Paul was presented with the Royal Photographic Society’s Education Award and continues to run photography workshops, retreats and mentoring programmes in the UK and abroad with Maria Falconer.