The Universe of D

Photographing Chudleigh

Background

I have been taking photographs for over 40 years, and from an early stage began documenting the area I lived in.

For 25 years I worked primarily as professional photographer 17 years as production photographer for the Northcott Theatre, for most of the major arts organisations in the county and for magazines including Arts South West and Devon Life. During this time my personal work took second place but I am now excited about the prospect of this personal project.

I have lived in Chudleigh for 18 years.

Much of my time is spent working on other photographers images and in teaching. And recently in the digitising of part the vast archive of photographs by photographer James Ravilious. James worked in North Devon from the 1970's till the 1990's, taking 80,000 images of daily life. My project will be on a much smaller scale! but will hope to mirror the range of images in that amazing body of work and document life in a Devon town in the 21^st century.

A flavour of James work can be found on the Beaford Archive web site.

This Project

I work using digital cameras, and my 'darkroom' is a computer running Linux OS and specialist photographic software. The images as you will see are in black and white, this is not to mimic any other photographers work, it is because in many ways photography is about light and shade, my early work was in black and white and I feel that working this way is suited to a documentary approach.