Projects

When I conceived this series of pictures, I was thinking about my time at school. I realised that most of my memories were from the playground. It had been a space of excitement, games, bullying, laughing, tears, teasing, fun, and fear. It seemed an interesting place to go back and explore in photographs. I started the project in the UK, revisiting my school and some of the other schools nearby. I became fascinated by the diversity of children’s experiences, depending on their school. The contrasts between British schools made me curious to know what schools were like in other countries.

Most of the images from the series are composites of moments that happened during a single break time—a kind of time-lapse photography. I have often chosen to feature details that relate to my own memories of the playground. Although the schools I photographed were very diverse, I was struck by the similarities between children’s behaviour and the games they played.

While watching a nature program on primates I was struck by their facial similarity to our own. Humans are clearly different to animals, but the great apes inhabit that grey area between man and animal. I thought it would be interesting to try to photograph gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos and orangutans using the aesthetic of the passport photograph- its ubiquitous style inferring the idea of identity. I decided against photographing in zoos or using ‘animal actors’ but traveled to Cameroon, Republic of Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo and Indonesia to meet orphans of the bush meat trade and live pet trade.

In 2018 Issey Miyake asked me to photograph a new project of his called ‘Session One’. Inspired the ‘Jomon’ period in in Japan (14,000-1000BC) when Japan was inhabited by hunter gathers. The technical cloth is specially woven and takes its form after being steamed creating something more sculptural than just clothes.

In 2005 I started photographing fans outside different concerts. I was fascinated by the different tribes of people that attend them, and how people emulate celebrity to form their identity. As I photographed the project I began to see how the concerts became events for people to come together with surrogate ‘families’, a chance to relive their youth or try and be part of a scene that happened before they were born.

While in Colombia researching an idea for a photographic project called Narcotecture, I found a bag of photographs on Pablo Escobar’s private prison. It set me on a journey for the next 3 years searching for visual material and meeting people who knew Pablo Escobar. Pablo Escobar was ‘the richest and most violent gangster in history’, the head of the Medellin Cartel, which was responsible for supplying 80 per cent of the world’s cocaine during the 1980s. In an attempt to avoid extradition to the USA, he declared war on the Colombian state and thousands died as a result. For this brief web version I have extended the visual intro to the book.

A few years ago I had a show at Issey Miyake’s 21_21 design museum which is part of the swanky shopping centre called Tokyo Midtown. Each day while mounting the show I had wandered past the ‘Green Dog’ a spa, ‘holistic care’ and culinary shop for dogs. Running along side the shop is the glass walled spa where you can gaze in at dogs being shampooed, receiving mud masks or rock salt massages, or getting their hair styled. The faces of the dogs as they were blown dried and the resulting teddy bear cuts had remained with me, and when I was next in Japan I headed straight back to see fluffy mutts.

Series of 9 photographs of cocoa pickers for the show ‘Chocolate’

Northern white-faced owls are small. When faced with a bigger, more threatening owl, they react with extreme physical transformations, either puffing out into a large fan of feathers or—if their opponent is too big to intimidate—compressing themselves to imitate a tree branch.

Owls’ night-vision eyes are striking in their enormity, weighing up to 5 percent of the birds’ total body mass. Their direct stare is a function of their physiology, since their eyes don’t move in the sockets. But the birds make up for it by being able to swivel their heads up to 270 degrees in either direction.

In 2014 David McKendrick and Lee Belcher ask me to photograph some collectors for them in the style of ‘Where Children Sleep’ for the launch of their re-designed Christie’s Magazine. The project has become an on-going collaboration, so if you know of any interesting collectors please get in touch.