What inspired you to take photographs?

staying true to your early vision

What inspired you to take photographs?

I often think back to the early days of my photography. What inspired me to take photographs? The short answer is looking at printed photographs in magazines.

As a family we lived in Brasil in the 1950’s and 1960’s. When I was 8, I was packed off to boarding school, visiting home once a year. The school library used to take the Illustrated London News and the National Geographic. I remember looking at the photographs and being transported to faraway places. I used to marvel at the photographs. Still do. There was no TV at school or home. The printed photograph was the only way to see the world, short of travel. Today it’s quite hard to imagine a world with no moving images and screens. But that’s how it was for me and most other people then. Unless you went to the cinema, but that was never an option for me.

My father was a keen photographer in Brasil, mainly 35mm but some 120. He subscribed to National Geographic and was also able to borrow copies of Life magazine from some American friends. Those magazines were never thrown away. My father also had a small collection of Picture Posts, which by that time had ceased to exist as a live magazine. I don’t know where he got them from, but they had been handed around a lot.

Salvador, Brasil 1965 taken by me

I remember sitting with my Dad on the verandah, after the heat of the day, looking through the magazines. He would turn the pages, occasionally pausing to talk about a particular picture. He also had a couple of books by Cartier-Bresson which we looked at together many times. It’s difficult to get tired of a Cartier-Bresson photograph, at least so I find. I can still see many of them in my mind’s eye.

My first photograph with my own camera, A Kodak Box Brownie. 1961

Later as a teenager I would be in awe of war photographers, and indeed wanted to be one but, perhaps thankfully, got diverted to other things. Lee Miller, Eugene Smith, Philip Jones Griffiths, Larry Burrows, Sir Don McCullin – an astonishing tradition. I still look at the work of conflict photographers to this day and follow several on some of my social media feeds.

But today, I am with this:

A wonderful photographer for the Picture Post. The thing about him is that he spent quite a bit of time, being the most junior photographer at the Post, in the darkroom developing pictures taken by Bert Hardy, Bill Brandt, Hutton and others. Living day to day with the work of great photographers, printing their work – one couldn’t hope for a better schooling.

It takes me back to where it all started for me – the thrill of looking at printed photographs. And when occasionally things are going against me, (I’m a fulltime carer for a loved one with Alzheimer’s and write a blog on that), I try to remember my early days in photography and think back to how simple and innocent it can be. No talk of art or theory or gear or chemicals.

Perhaps I spend too much time thinking of such stuff and not enough time behind a camera? Just to have pictures of things that matter to you is enough isn’t it? And if you can have the picture in your hand, well that’s a bonus.

What’s your story? What inspired you to take up photography?