It started with a priest and a camera I wasn’t allowed to touch.
Gilling Castle, North Yorkshire, sometime in the early 1980s. My Form Master was Father Gerald — a Benedictine monk with a Nikon and an eye for black-and-white reportage. He didn’t teach me photography. He just showed me photographs, and something shifted. By the time I got my hands on a Praktica MTL3, I already knew this was going to be a long relationship.
That was forty years ago. I’m still at it.
I’m Ian — a photographer, writer, and fourth horn player living in the Vendée in western France, though I’ve never quite stopped being from the north of England. I came to France the way people come to most of the important things in their lives: for love, and then I stayed because it became home. I shoot mostly film. Mostly black and white. Mostly with a Nikon FE, though the Fujifilm X100F has earned its place in the bag for anything that moves too fast for a roll of HP5.
The blog started in 2019. I didn’t intend it to become what it is — over three hundred essays now, on photography, place, memory, music, and the odd detour into whatever is currently making me think. I started writing because I wanted to say something about the photographs beyond their technical merits. Somewhere along the way the writing became as important to me as the images, and I stopped pretending otherwise.
This is not a gear review site, though I write about gear honestly when it’s worth the conversation. It’s not a tutorial site, though there are tutorials here for anyone who wants them. What it actually is, if I’m honest, is a long memoir in instalments — about what it means to pay attention to the world, to carry a camera through it, and to try to write down what you find.
If you want to know where to start, the Start Here page will do a better job of orienting you than I can in a single paragraph. If you want to see the photographs, the print shop is definitely worth your time. And if you want to know what I actually think about photography — not the technique, but the why of it — the Philosophy Series is where that conversation lives.
I built this for my children, really. Something that will still be here when I’m not. But I’m glad you found it too.
— Ian