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. I shine a light on the people the world ignores. There’s no dignity in faceless anonymity.

No mission statement.

Just reality.

Here you will see what happened next.