Personal Projects
The working method
Documentary photography demands presence. Not extraction — I spend months or years embedded in the communities I photograph, building trust before making pictures. The camera is secondary to listening, showing up, being useful. The work happens alongside the people photographed, not at a distance.
This is reportage. Pictures are made as things happen — light, weather, the rhythm of labour — with minimal direction. No setups. The discipline is seeing what is actually there and having the skill to hold it.
The Last Draught
Following inshore fishing crews and the decline of small-boat fleets along the coast.
The small-boat fleet is disappearing. Fuel costs, quota pressure, and the economics of scale that favour industrial trawlers have pushed independent fishermen to the margins. The boats themselves — wooden hulls, patched diesel engines, families' work across generations — are being retired or left to rot in harbours.
I began this project five years ago, spending early mornings on fishing boats out of three different harbours. The work is about the boats, the light at first light, the hands that know every repair. And it is about the economics that are killing the trade, visible in who still goes out and who has given up.
This project is still running. The story is not finished.
Yard Work
Boatyards and repair sheds — welders, riggers, timber shipwrights.
A trade passed down through families is thinning out. Boatyard work — welding, rigging, the craft of timber shipbuilding — is knowledge held by people in their sixties and seventies. There are few apprentices. When they retire, the knowledge goes with them.
This project is unposed and observational. I made repeat visits to three working yards over five years, watching the same people work, learning to see what mattered. The pictures are about hands, concentration, the specific way light falls on wet timber and fresh-welded steel. And they are about time running out for a particular kind of work.
The work is still happening — it is happening less often every year.
Tide Line
Harbour towns dependent on a single industry, and how community identity is tied to work that is disappearing.
These towns exist because of one thing: fish processing, boat repair, chandlery, the daily business of feeding and servicing a fleet. The pubs, the shops, the rhythm of the week, the identity of the place — all built on work that is now mechanised, consolidated, or outsourced.
I am photographing what remains: the processing plants with skeleton crews, the supply shops that are closing, the pubs where the talk is all about who has left and who is next. I am photographing the people whose parents' work is disappearing in front of them.
This project is still being made. The towns are still changing.
On reportage
This is not staged portraiture. There are no setups. Pictures are made as things happen — as light changes, as people work, as the weather moves. The craft is in the seeing and in the technical skill to hold what you see.
The same discipline carries over into commissioned work. A corporate portrait is still reportage — it is made as the person is actually present, not performed. A story about your business or your community is told truthfully, made over time, with minimal direction. That is what you get when you hire a documentary photographer.
Commission work
If your editorial, corporate, or institutional project needs the same approach — reportage, embedded time, truth over performance — I am available for assignment work. Details and availability on the commissions page.