About

About

I’m a journalist and documentary photographer from the West Midlands. The region’s glorifications of the working class — and all the reductionist bullshit that comes with it — taught me early not to trust grand narratives, club-brand identities, or men in suits. I learned to pay attention to what everyone else steps over, mostly because I was what they were avoiding. I was told to fuck off by the very higher-education system I’d been groomed to join.  I settled for an “if all else fails” career in education. It never had any prospect of succeeding.

After years working in teaching, I was still scraping the breadline, living out of my mum’s spare room, and drowning in corporate non-think. So much for the social contract; so much for the advertised life of romance and intellectual fulfilment. What remained was wasteland weekends with the family, Gardener’s World, Antiques Roadshow and Time Team. I stuck pins in the map. Better that than in my eyes.

The first job that said “yes” was in a place called Chachoengsao in Thailand. No, I couldn’t pronounce it either. Google wasn’t much help beyond a white temple that looked like a layered wedding cake. It seemed as good a place to start as any. I bought a Kindle and a one-way ticket.

I’ve spent years in Southeast Asia — mostly Myanmar and Thailand — working at the G-string-budget, need-not-apply end of the social scale. You learn to recognise the spectacle in the gutter when you grew up in it. Train-station communities, back-alley graft, the parts of life the travel industry edits out. I’m not interested in exoticism or trauma-tourism. If a moment doesn’t have its own dignity, I leave it alone. I want to shine a light on the people the rest of the world ignores. There’s no dignity in faceless anonymity.

Most of what I make — essays or photo series — comes down to one principle: look properly, write cleanly, and don’t romanticise or simplify what doesn’t deserve it. I’m allergic to sentimentality, unimpressed by off-the-shelf spectacle, and more interested in the contradictions that give away how people actually live.

No mission statement.

Just the reality of what’s out there.

Here you will see what happened next.