I'm basically a documentary photographer. I'm based in Sheffield in the North of England. My work is varied but I do a lot of stills work for film and TV. I have exhibited at The Open Eye gallery in Liverpool and The Photographers Gallery in London. I also do wedding photojournalism, and have photographed various celebrity weddings in recent years. Take a look at http://www.fragmentsphotography.co.uk/ to view my wedding website.
Whitby Goth Festival in North Yorkshire is held twice a year, once in April and once in October, goths and steam punks come from all over the country and abroad.
Here are a few photos I've taken in the past few years of Alex Higgins who was found dead on Saturday night. They say you should never meet your heros and certainly from my point of view this is a case in point. No doubt he was one of the greatest snooker players ever though.
Sunday, 14 February 2010
I shot this a few months back but seems quite relevant now with the Imodesty Blaize film released recently and the upcoming film Burlesque starring Christina Aguilera and Cher. There seems to be a big burlesque revival at the moment.
Bashar Al Assad is the president of Syria he succeeding to the presidency after the death of his father former president Hafiz al-Assad. The cult of Personality, a very prominent feature of his father’s regime is something the current president has made clear he dislikes, but despite this fact his image and that of his father are seen all over Syria.
We Are One is published in hardback by Quadrille Publishing today and contains three of my photographs of the Kombai and Korowai tribes from West Papua. All proceeds go to Survival International to help tribal people all over the world.
Here is a link to some of the photographs in the book on the Gaurdian website
In March of this year I took a trip in a dugout canoe up the Ellanden River in West Papua. I photographed from the canoe as we moved up the river.
The Ellanden runs from the Papuan highlands to the lowlands in the south and eventually in to the Arafura sea. I had started in Agats and was going up the river a distance of over 100 miles from where I would begin a treck in to the jungle to photograph the remote Kombai tribe.
Here is a selection of photographs taken from the dugout.
This is a long term project of mine to document some of the many tribes of West Papua. I have been four times now, the first time was in 2004 and most recently in March of 2009. There is nowhere like it and I love it. I have photographed the Dani, the Mek, The Komorro, Korowai, Kombai and Asmat tribes to date and will be uploading more images from the trips. I will split the gallery in to individual tribal galleries when I have uploaded the majority of the work. It may be of interest that Survival International will be publishing a book this year commemorating 40 years of helping tribal people, they will be using several of my images in the book, it is to be called "We are One". Two of my photos are also used in their diaries available from http://www.survival-international.org/ I also have a book publisher in Holland interested in publishing the work.
Didn't have very long in Damascus as we were filming in Latakia in the north of Syria, it's very frustrating been in such a wonderful place with no time to take photographs. I did however have an hours Taxi ride in the city on our return from the filming and shot these portraits, some of them as we passed at very high speed, not ideal circumstances for photography but they have a certain quality about them that I like, something of a departure from my usual work but perhaps a step in the right direction.
Just returned from three weeks in Syria, shooting stills for the director Najdat Anzour's new 30 part tv series to be aired during ramadam. Najdat Anzour is probably the biggest director in the whole of the Arab speaking world and is recognised everywhere, probably the equivelent to Steven Spielberg in the West. He is something of a tyrant, but in the nicest possible way. On the set of this latest film he shot a revolver at the feet of Kalib, his production assistent on a daily basis when he displeased him, but it was all done with great humour, and I liked him very much. He works exceptionally fast in comparison to working on a film set here in the UK, but even by Arabic standards I was told he was quick. Najdat also has a feature film in the pipeline, it is set during the colonial rule of Libya by Italy in the 1930's and was written by Gadaffi. I was privaliged enough to see a teaser for this film and it was stunningly photographed and very beautiful. Najdat has asked me to do the stills for it when it goes into production, I agreed.
I have not long since returned from another trip (my fourth) to West Papua. I was there this time to photograph the Asmat tribe on the Southern coast and around the area of Agats, notorious for being the spot that Michael Rockerfeller went missing, presumed eaten, or possibly drowned.
My own trip, although not nearly as bad as Mr Rockerfellers was not as succesful as I had hoped. The area is extremely difficult to get to and once there even harder to get around, especially on a budget, and I'm always on a budget. I arrived in Tamika and after two failed attempts to get to Agats by speed boat, the first attempt failed because the speed boat driver was drunk, the second attempt was slightly more succesful in that we actualy got out to sea but then had to turn back due to the weather. Then the speed boat driver did a bunk with some of my equipment and his fee for taking me to Agats, which I'd foolishly given him in advance. By this time I had spent four days in Timika, trying to get out. I wanted to make the most of my time there so I visited the prostitutes of Ten Kilo...
Ten Kilo resembles what I would imagine a wild west frontier town to have been like. It is basically a village of prostitutes, they were moved from the actual town of Timika because the workers from the Freeport copper and gold mine, the largest in the world, were spending too much time in the brothels and not returning to work.
While photographing at Ten Kilo I received the news that a cargo boat captain had agreed to my hitching a ride to Agats for a very modest sum. I returned to Tamika to collect my gear and then boarded the cargo boat, I found a spot between some crates, that turned out to contain some very smelly pigs, and tried to get some sleep. I was finally on my way albeit very slowly, the journey took two full days but it was good to finally arrive in Agats, I think the pigs thought so too.
I am a photographer, it is my great passion and I am also lucky enough to make my living from it. I've been passionate about it since the age of nine when I got a camera for my birthday, I began to develop and print my own black and white films and prints. I have done it ever since and have never lost the initial excitement I had when I first saw an image appear before me in the dev tray, it was like magic.
Around the same time as my interest in photography developed (no pun intended) I read Gavin Maxwell's "A Reed Shaken by the Wind", about his travels with Wilfred Thiesiger among the Marsh Arabs. This book along with Laurens Van Der Post's "The Lost World of the Kalahari" about the San Bushmen nurtured in me another passion, for Tribal Cultures, it's only in more recent years I have been able to combine it with my photography and indulge myself in trips to far flung places to photograph some of the remaining tribal people on the planet. You can view some of the resulting work at http://www.grenvillecharles.co.uk
I am also available for weddings and bar mitzvahs. No, I am really, well weddings anyway, I've never photographed a bar mitzvah, but I would.
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