A snap of a father’s day card my kids sent me recently. I’m in the middle :-)

The original photograph was taken on Kodachrome in the early 1990’s in the Picos Mountains, North Spain.

Some of the most meaningful photos we keep, come from apparently inconsequential, unplanned, quite ‘ordinary’ moments. Perhaps this is why they can be so special.

Photography has been part of my life for over sixty years. It began when I was eight, and it has never really stopped — every day, in one form or another, I make photographs.

I live near Liverpool, and I work with whatever the moment offers: a digital camera, a roll of 35mm, a sheet of 4×5 film. I have my own darkroom, and some of my most absorbing work happens there — bromoils, paper negatives, processes that resist hurrying. But I'm as comfortable adjusting a scan in Lightroom as I am coating paper by hand.

For most of my life, I've worked in what I think of as the wayfaring mode — no plan, no predetermined subject, just attention and readiness. I still believe in that approach. But as I've grown older I've found myself drawn to longer projects, sustained engagements with a subject, which is something I once resisted. I'm not sure what that says about me, but I find it interesting.

I write about photography too. My background is in philosophy, and I'm drawn to the harder questions — what a photograph actually does, what it shows that cannot quite be said and why that is so. I know that interests some people and puts others off entirely, and I'm comfortable with both.

I've spent a lifetime looking at other photographers' work. I'm wary of influence lists — they're always reductive — but if pressed: Cartier-Bresson for composition, Wright Morris for the eloquence of ordinary interiors, Gordon Parks for his tact, Andrew Sanderson for the depth of his attention, Tony Ray-Jones for the wit.

I have also been involved in advocacy work. I was on the organising committee for the Liverpool International Festival of Photography (LOOK/17); I was a board member of the Open Eye Gallery, the largest photographic gallery in the north of England, and I have been a board member and trustee of the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain.