Welcome to my website
About me
I am an independent photographer and researcher based in Canterbury, with a particular interest in landscape, urban and travel photography. My professional work has been as an academic with expertise in social theory and the sociology of violence and conflict. I’m now Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent, UK. In recent years I have developed an interest in both the practice of photography and photographic aesthetics and in 2020 my article, ‘Social Theory, Photography and the Visual Aesthetic of Cultural Modernity’, won the 2021 SAGE Prize for Innovation and Excellence. In 2024 I published an essay on the photography of Edith Tudor Hart’s (in whom I have a long-standing interest), ‘Social Realism and Edith Tudor Hart’ in S. Read ed., Poverty For Sale Edith Tudor Hart in Britain London: Museums Etc pp.147-156. This was published to coincide with the Exhibition: Edith Tudor Hart, at the Salzburg Fotohof. https://fotohof.at/en/news/exhbition-opening-edith-tudor-hart/
Photography and sociology have approximately the same birth date around 1839, when Auguste Comte first used the term sociology and Daguerre made public his method for fixing an image on a plate. So as ways of recording the world they have in a way grown up together. Both have from the start been caught up in disputes about truth and how we know the world. I’ve had a camera as long as I can remember and in my own photography I’m interested using the medium to tell stories about the world around us. This is not an easy thing for any photographer to do because the image is frozen in time – it was there and then – while the world is always moving and that second will never return. We try then to read through the image to see the stories behind the photograph. This website is work in progress and as I add more images I will also give some brief accounts of how I came to be there and why the scenes were interesting.