I consider myself an author not an illustrator. I’m not interested in producing photographs for other people’s stories. I’m only interested in presenting my own bodies of work, so I have to be able to talk about the issues behind the stories I’m telling.

I studied geography at university because my parents wouldn’t let me study photography. But I’m glad I didn’t do a degree in photography. I think it would have given me a narrow outlook, whereas I think studying geography has made me a better photographer. It has given my work context.

At university, we started looking at subjects I had never heard of before, such as cultural geography. And I came into contact with geographers such as Peter Jackson, who focuses on the geography of consumption, and Nicky Gregson, who was studying car boot sales. It opened my eyes to subjects that have been important in my work.

My dissertation looked at representations of East Africa in tourist literature. I spent eight weeks with a group of tourists on an overland trip to see how their representations of Africa changed once they had encountered the place. But, they still wanted to get the photo of the Maasai warrior, the child with a begging bowl, the impala, the lion, as if they were ticking things off a list. Interestingly, the photo albums they produced on their return were very similar to the tourist literature they saw before they left.

A lot of the magazine work I did when I started out stemmed directly from things I studied in geography. I won the Sunday Times Young Photographer of the Year award for an idea about the so-called Snow Birds: elderly Americans from the northern states who follow the patterns of migratory birds and travel down to the southern states for the winter. There’s a place in Arizona where the population shifts from 6,000 people for nine months of the year to half a million for three months of the year.

I grew up with Russian stereotypes as the baddies in James Bond films, and [for Motherland] I didn’t want to re-photograph what I had imagined Russia was like, so I spent a lot of time reading Russian literature and looking at Russian art and photography. Since the fall of Communism, a lot of the images that have come out of Russia have been metaphors of collapse, deterioration, decay. I couldn’t help wondering whether that was really all there was to the country. So I shot in colour, using a very constrained structure, where possible with a standard lens – which is as the eye sees – and never tilting the camera. The portraits are very deadpan, almost a catalogue of the Russians I came across. I wanted them to challenge other people’s stereotypes.

Rodina is the Russian word for ‘motherland’. It’s very difficult to describe what it means. Rosamund Bartlett, a Russian literature expert, explains it as: ‘The extraordinary, almost physical attachment that Russians have for their native landscape.’ It’s this sense of belonging to this place. But it’s more than patriotism because it isn’t necessarily related to the Russian state. It’s almost a shared history of suffering, set against the harsh landscape and the Russian winter. There’s a sense of having endured so much that it has made them stronger, but it’s also tinged
with melancholy.

It was doing the Russia work that got me thinking about doing the England work. As an Englishman, I didn’t feel particularly connected to England, so I was really interested in going on a similar journey around my own homeland to explore the relationship between people and place.

There has been a rich tradition of British photographers photographing the British landscape, but interestingly, over the past couple of decades, there hasn’t been a great deal. Maybe it’s because my generation has very much gone abroad – the lure of cheap flights and the exotic other – so it felt quite timely to go on this journey and to extend that tradition.

I chose leisure as my theme as it’s one thing we do self-consciously. Shooting with a large-format camera created these very large tableaux photos, where the people were quite small in the frame. You could still see them, but they weren’t the central part of the picture. They became constellations within the landscape.

CV

1974   Born in Croydon, South London
1986-92  Attended Oxted County School, Oxted, Surrey
1993-96 BA (Hons) in human geography at the University of Sheffield
1997  Distinction in photojournalism, Sheffield College
1999  Winner of the Ian Parry Award: the Sunday Times Young Photographer of the Year
2004-05  Travelled around Russia
2007  Published Motherland, a book of photos from the Russian journey
2007-08  Travelled around England photographing leisure pursuits
2008 Solo exhibition, Unseen, Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai
2009 Published We English, a collection of photos from the journey around England