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2nd & 3rd August 2025
LEAMINGTON SPA
10am-6pm
BritainUSA & Other Stories
Website:
'@shortsimonphoto
London Minnesota USA
Manchester Pop 81 North Dakota USA
Newcastle Farm Supplies, Texas, USA
Biography
My mission is to sell my road-trip photographs of America 'with a difference' to the general public at affordable prices. My vision is to come up with a different idea, and process, to anyone else I know selling their work in the way I do to the public. So instead of the almost stereotypical idea of a road-trip, motels and diners say, my main theme is to visit the smallest and most remote villages in America with a British name. So I find a Manchester with population only 81, the name 'Wimbledon' stuck onto a barn in the middle of North Dakota, an old shop front still bearing the name 'Newcastle Farm Supplies, and so on. Plus anything of interest or strange I see along the way I consider fair game. My process is to use colour film and I print myself in colour darkrooms.
inspiration
Colour film photographers from the 1970's, when artists arguably started using this medium to document and see the everyday around them in a new light, people like Stephen Shore and William Egglestone. A period known as the "New Topographics'. Earlier than that even when photography was used as a documentary tool in the 1930's. Some of my inspiration simply comes from a fascination of America, probably from an early age and possibly in part subconsciously too, all the American culture we have been fed in this country, through television series and films. It was clear I was going to study art after school, and the Art Foundation course most people take after school unexpectedly perhaps led me towards photography, so I combined my Degree in photography with America, and a training to get me to think of new ideas and methods.
medium
As touched on earlier, I am a colour photographer. Unlike most photographers I use film and print my own work in colour darkrooms, which already stands me apart from most photographers. I also use a medium-format camera, which produces far richer and more detailed photographs than the more widely used and better known 35mm film. I prefer film to digital pixels because the real world is not made of pixels, so I prefer to use a medium that reflects the grainy reality of the real world. This is a purely analogue approach from start to finish, to computers involved! I also produce and control my own work from start to finish - from the dusty plains of Texas to the snow and wind-swept fields of Minnesota, to the printing all carried out by me, no-one else involved!