anthony coleman
“I trained first in architecture but had fallen in love with photography when I developed my first print in the black and white darkroom at school (something between alchemy and an epithany) – and come across the work of Henri Cartier Bresson. A short course in photojournalism got me knocking on doors and I was fortunate enough to cut my teeth shooting a wide variety of features for Fleet Street broadsheets and their colour magazines. Feeling a lack of any real formal training tough I decided to enrol on an MA at the Royal College of Art where I was able to pin down the type of photography that really interested me. The contextual landscape, architecture and space – the built environment and the world around us. Walker Evans, the Bechers, Andreas Gursky, Joel Sternfeld, Chris Kilip and Stephen Shore all became heroes, along with 17th century Dutch painters Hendrick Avercamp and Pieter Saenredam.
I have been fortunate enough to work with some of the country’s greatest architects, some of the largest practices, and some of the smallest. Photographing architecture is a great joy – a form of photography that one can take one’s time over, working with the light, the weather and the seasons, but also those serendipitous and ephemeral moments that can bring a picture to life.
Ultimately what I seek to do is create images that transcend their own physicality – which go beyond what they are literally “of” – which become objects in their own right”
