I was born in the midlands city of Coventry in the United Kingdom in August 1968. After a fairly unremarkable school life, and after failing at most of my exams, apart from art, I began my career as a trainee photographer on my local newspaper. The year was 1987.
As was industry standard in those days my newspaper the
Coventry Evening Telegraph sent me to college in Yorkshire to the city of Sheffield where I qualified as a photo-journalist. I then worked as a freelance photographer from 1992 until 2002, working for most of the national media outlets (the good and the bad) in the United Kingdom.
In September 2002 I went travelling for six months trying to reconnect with the places and the past that one half of my family had always told me about; India. I continued travelling, making portraits of the people I encountered along the way, exploring India until the summer of 2009.
My grandpa was a photographer for
The Times of India newspaper, working from their offices in Bombay in the 1930s, and he was the inspiration for me making my own collection of images in India.
My family is Anglo-Indian. The 'Anglos' are descended from the employees, mainly men, who worked for the East India Company. These officers and officials made a new home for themselves in India, some never wanting to return home to Britain. They chose to stay in India and many of them married Indian women. The mixed race children from these marriages soon developed a hybrid British/Indian identity all of their own. Their distinct culture lasted in India for over two centuries until soon after partition in 1947 when they began to disperse themselves around the globe. The Anglo-Indians were part of the ethnic fabric of colonial India and were referred to in the days of Empire as India’s
new caste. Their story has almost been forgotten.
