A Photographic Life - 277: Plus Nicholas Sinclair

In episode 277 UNP founder and curator Grant Scott is in his shed reflecting on understanding and promoting contemporary landscape photography, when clients are made redundant, and what a photographer leaves behind.

Plus this week, photographer Nicholas Sinclair takes on the challenge of supplying Grant with an audio file no longer than 5 minutes in length in which he answer’s the question ‘What Does Photography Mean to You?’

Nicholas Sinclair was born in London in 1954 and studied Fine Art and Art History at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne between 1973 to 1976. His career as a photographer began in 1982 while playing the drums in a Moroccan circus when he began taking photographs of the circus acts between performances, photographs that were first published by The British Journal of Photography in 1983 and exhibited at The University of Sussex in the same year. After the season ended, he visited other circuses with the aim of extending the series. This work was subsequently shown at The National Theatre in London in 1985 and at The Photography Centre of Athens in 1986. In 1987 he began photographing British artists in their studios a series of portraits that spans thirty years and includes Anthony Caro, Gillian Wearing, Frank Auerbach, Gilbert & George, Paula Rego and Richard Hamilton. Work from this series is now in the permanent collections of European museums and galleries including The National Portrait Gallery and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, amongst other institutions. Forty-seven of these portraits are in the collection of Pallant House Gallery in Chichester where they were exhibited in 2014. In 1995 he was commissioned by Brighton Museum & Art Gallery to make a series of photographs of contemporary fetishism for inclusion in the exhibition Fetishism: Visualising Power and Desire. In 2002 Sinclair published his first book of landscape photographs entitled Crossing the Water, a series made on the perimeter of a lake over a twelve-month period. In 2003 he was made a Hasselblad Master and in 2009 Sinclair moved to Berlin and established a studio there in 2011. In 2019 a German production company made a thirty-minute documentary about his work and he was appointed Visiting Professor at Richmond, The American International University in London. In 2021 Sinclair published Polaroids, a book of studio portraits to mark ten years of working in the studio and a short film entitled Rhythm of the Blood. He is currently working on a new series of photographs titled Neon Trees Miscellany made in East Berlin. www.nicholassinclair.com

Dr. Grant Scott is the founder/curator of United Nations of Photography, a Senior Lecturer and Subject Co-ordinator: Photography at Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, a working photographer, documentary filmmaker, BBC Radio contributor and the author of Professional Photography: The New Global Landscape Explained (Routledge 2014), The Essential Student Guide to Professional Photography (Routledge 2015), New Ways of Seeing: The Democratic Language of Photography (Routledge 2019). His film Do Not Bend: The Photographic Life of Bill Jay was first screened in 2018 www.donotbendfilm.com. He is the presenter of the A Photographic Life and In Search of Bill Jay podcasts.

Scott’s next book Condé Nast Have Left The Building: Six Decades of Vogue House will be published by Orphans Publishing in the Spring of 2024.

© Grant Scott 2023