Movers & Shakers- Faces of a changing city.
Portrait Project in Collaboration with the Birmingham Central Library .An extensive project shot in my home city in the lead up to the bid for City of Culture. The images were shot on film and then digital capture on a Hasselblad with a few exceptions. Considered environmental portraits should not be rushed and hopefully the results shall provide a document of the city at the time, the work is now archived at the Birmingham Central Library.
Birmingham - Movers and Shakers - Faces of a changing City.
An exhibition at Birmingham Symphony Hall September 2005 - February 2006 - seen by over 60,000 people.
The original concept for the photographic portrait project was to create a body of work that would be part of the Birmingham City of Culture bid and also promote a Photographic gallery based in the Birmingham Library that was at that time in a planning stage. The portrait project was supported by the late Pete James, head of photographs at Birmingham Central Library, without his tireless support and help the project would have never happened. The final exhibition of a hundred environmental portraits was intended to be exhibited in the new Bull Ring ,this was planned as I wanted the exhibition to engage with the public and have a much wider audience than the usual photography exhibition. Sadly that was not possible because of costs and space issues. The Birmingham Symphony Hall kindly agreed to the exhibition and after five years in development it opened in September 2005, the opening was performed by the then Anglican Bishop of Birmingham, Dr John Sentamu , who was one of the subjects of the collection & Colin Ford CBE.
The project was started in 2001, but the majority of the portraits were taken between 2003 and 2005, this coincided with the change from film to digital and in-fact most images were taken on a Hasselblad V system, on film,then scanned, the last year of 2005 the subjects were taken with the same system but with a Digital back . The 100 prints were printed by the Birmingham Lab, Colin Alford Colour and the images were deposited at the Birmingham Central Library archive, a number of the images were added to the National Portrait Gallery archive.
The subjects were chosen to try and represent a cross section of the new diverse and dynamic society that was changing the face of Birmingham, many were obvious choices, but many were nominated and the original target of 50 subjects was not enough to represent a city, it. was in-fact going to be an ongoing project, but my circumstances changes and although I retain may ties with Birmingham, I moved to Spain after a period in Worcestershire then returned to London and in 2013 I returned to Stratford on Avon where I am now based.
