We’re Not “Post-Covid” yet
Looking at when I last posted here, it seems I’ve let things slip a bit. I hope you’ve missed me.
My excuse is I’ve been busy with work, a book, a photo festival and covid finally got me. Then I got over covid, and work came back with a vengeance.
Ok, a bit more detail to explain all this.
Since December 2021 I’ve been working on my first photo book, What Happened Here (the book of the Saxonvale project I shot between 2017 and 2019). I started work on the book when I agreed to be part of Photo|Frome. I was invited to be part of an exhibition and to present a talk on What Happened Here, which meant I really needed to have the book in place for the festival.
Putting a book together isn’t easy if you want it to be the best it can be, and never having done a book before made this an even more challenging kind of challenge. However, I worked with designer Victoria Yates for the book layout and colours, and graphic designer Nik Jones who produced a map to help tell the story.
Then as Photo|Frome approached I got involved with planning my talk as well as another event I was to be involved with, a conversation with documentary and portrait photographer John Angerson. All this while work continued to roll in.
But just as the festival got underway, John caught covid and had to pull out of his talk. Then I got covid and had to cancel mine. It was all a bit of a mess really, and deeply disappointing.
What I haven’t been disappointed by is the success of photo|frome. Although I wasn’t one of the main organisers, I did jump in to help and support as much as I could (cut short only by my testing positive for Covid for 10 days). The festival was testament to the need for high-quality talks and exhibitions around photography, and there’s little outside London that caters to such a broad range of people as Frome’s festival did. The plan is to make it even bigger next year and they’ve already got national and international photographers lined up.
Equally encouraging has been the reception my book has received. I had people reserving copies before it was even printed. I expected to sell the majority of the books at my talk, but sales have been steady even without that. And because the book is very limited edition (just 50 hardback copies and 100 softcover versions), there’s a risk that by the time I come to reschedule the talk, the books might already be sold out.
So there you have it. I think it’s fair to say I’ve been a bit preoccupied lately and that’s not going to change drastically in the next few weeks at least.
I have my talk to reschedule, client work to handle and I’m also painfully aware just how neglected my current personal project on Salisbury Plain has been. I need to get back to that before it keels over completely.
In the meantime, if you’d like to support my personal work, and be the proud owner of a very limited edition photo book, head over here to purchase your copy of What Happened Here. Every copy I sell justifies all the stress and hard work just that little bit more.
Thank you,
Tim