I should probably thank my dad for my lifelong interest in all things photographic. For many years, he worked as a producer and director for the Government’s Commonwealth and Foreign Office making documentary films. There were always cameras and camera related things dotted about the house, stuffed in to various cameras bags; light meters, flash units, cable releases, filters, numerous rolls of film and some things that I didn’t recognise but just intrigued me. The cameras themselves were mostly Canon I seem to remember, but there was also a beautiful old twin lens reflex too, a Rolliflex maybe, which was sadly either lost or maybe even given away. But these things of mechanical wonder were more than enough to fire my young imagination.

I was gifted my own first proper camera on my thirteenth birthday. It was a Ricoh XR-X, which might not mean much to many reading this, but to me it felt like something from the future. It had an LCD menu screen, a chunky grip and the shutter made a satisfying ‘kshtk’ sound, and judging by the boxes full of prints and transparencies I now have, it was put to very good use, including for a few moody black and white self-portraits.

The late 80s and I went on to study photography as part of a fairly unstructured art college education, and in between bouts of lounging around ‘in search of inspiration’, I did fortunately also manage to spend a decent chunk of time printing in the dark rooms there, dodging and burning, a process Ansel Adams once described as “taking care of the mistakes God made in establishing tonal relationships”.

But as the quality of digital cameras and camera phones has evolved over the last fifteen or so years though, like a lot of people I guess, I was also seduced by it, and became a little lazier with regard to using film for stills. The boxes of physical photos, negatives and slides slowly gave way to flash cards, hard drives and cloud storage. My late photographer friend Graham Tucker, a self proclaimed ‘smudger’ often bemoaned the ease and disposability of modern digital, before he passed away gifted me his old Canon 35mm bodies and they sit next to my father’s old AE1 which is still used now and then.

Shooting film is a different experience and one that has sat alongside my digital journey, like a a reliable old friend. Perhaps some of my affinity for film is partly based on nostalgia as that’s how I started after all, it is a chemical process; light, chemistry and a bit of magic, that’s it. There is grain with film, sometimes lots of it, small particles of metallic silver. There are sometimes scratches too, and sprocket holes, and maybe even the odd light leak, unique to each frame. And such is the fascination with this now old technology, these characteristics and artefacts are often something often now imitated and added with digital formats; film emulation – ironically to make digital feel like film. So each frame of film has its own unique set of imperfections, and there is a tactile, tangible aspect to it, that digital, as wonderful, immediate and easy as it can be, just doesn’t have. I’m not knocking the digital evolution and don’t want to sound like a film evangelist, that would be slightly ridiculous considering I’ve embraced digital wholeheartedly with other areas I work in, but there’s still nothing more focusing, excuse the obvious pun, than knowing you have limited frames on a roll, each exposure counting just that little bit more. Film slows me down and requires me to pay more attention.

In addition to the occasional commercial project, including a lot of work for Nike during my time in advertising in the 90s, various charity projects, regular trips to Europe taking pictures for a family travel business, plus an exhibition of abstract work at St Martin in the Fields in the late 90s, stills photography has for me been largely a personal and private affair; photographic experiments and visual diaries of various adventures, pre-dating the veritable tidal wave of digital content now all over social media. Most of the pictures on here, were taken on either 35mm or 6×6 film, both E6 and C41 colour negs, with some digital and even possibly the odd iPhone shot.

This site was primarily set up to raise money for the crisis in Ukraine, but I thought it was perhaps about time some other images saw daylight too. It might be a bit of a mish-mash at the moment as I’m in the process of distilling it down and recategorising things, but I’ll add more to the shop over time, so if there is a specific image anyone likes as a framed print, please feel free to contact me.

For now, I hope you enjoy its contents and thanks for visiting.

Everything else I do can be found at https://matthewbeecroft.com