John Darwell (born 1955) is a British photographer.
Darwell was born in Bolton, Lancashire, [1] in 1955. He has a BA in photography from Manchester Polytechnic, and a PhD from the University of Sunderland. (His thesis was titled A Black Dog Came Calling: A Visualisation of Depression through Contemporary Photography.) [2] He is a Reader in photography at the University of Cumbria. [3]
As a photographer, Darwell "roots himself in neglected landscapes". [1] His early work, published in Working Lives and The Big Ditch, was in black and white, but he moved to colour soon thereafter and has not used black and white since. [4]
Jimmy Jock, Albert and the Six Sided Clock (published in 1993) shows the Liverpool docklands at a time when "the amount of cargo passing through the docks" was higher than ever before, but when, thanks to mechanization, everything was run by fewer than 600 men, down from over 20,000. [5]
For three weeks in late 1999, Darwell photographed within the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone: Pripyat, numerous villages, a landfill site, and people continuing to live within the Zone. This resulted in an exhibition and book titled Legacy. [6]
The first pyre intended to check the British outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in early 2001 took place very close to Darwell's house in Cumbria. Darwell devoted a year to photographing this and its aftermath; the resulting book, Dark Days, "catalogues the destruction that consumed local farming communities and shut Cumbria off from the outside world". [7]
DDSBs: Discarded Dog Sh*t Bags shows "a typology of discarded plastic bags containing dog muck", photographs Darwell presents "as evidence of our half-hearted commitment to the ecological cause". [1]
North West England is one of nine official regions of England and consists of the administrative counties of Cheshire, Cumbria, Greater Manchester, Lancashire and Merseyside. The North West had a population of 7,052,000 in 2011. It is the third-most-populated region in the United Kingdom, after the South East and Greater London. The largest settlements are Manchester and Liverpool.
Merseyside is a metropolitan and ceremonial county in North West England, with a population of 1.38 million. It encompasses the metropolitan area centred on both banks of the lower reaches of the Mersey Estuary and comprises five metropolitan boroughs: Knowsley, St Helens, Sefton, Wirral and the city of Liverpool. Merseyside, which was created on 1 April 1974 as a result of the Local Government Act 1972, takes its name from the River Mersey and sits within the historic counties of Lancashire and Cheshire.
Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery is a museum in Carlisle, England. Opened by the Carlisle Corporation in 1893, the original building is a converted Jacobean mansion, with extensions added when it was converted. At first the building contained the museum and also a library, an art school and a technical school.
Cumwhitton is a small village and civil parish close to Carlisle in Cumbria, England. It lies just east of the M6 and the nearest train station is located in Wetheral, 3 miles away. Cumwhitton is often confused with the nearby village of Cumwhinton in Wetheral parish. The population of the civil parish as taken at the 2011 Census was 310.
Christopher David Killip was a Manx photographer who worked at Harvard University from 1991 to 2017, as a Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies. Killip is known for his black and white images of people and places especially of Tyneside during the 1980s.
Markéta Luskačová is a Czech photographer known for her series of photographs taken in Slovakia, Britain and elsewhere. Considered one of the best Czech social photographers to date, since the 1990s she has photographed children in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and also Poland.
William James Blacklock was an English landscape painter, painting scenery in Cumbria, the Lake District and the Scottish Borders.
Stuart Roy Clarke is an English documentary photographer. His major works include The Homes of Football and Scenes from a British Summer Country Pop Music Festival.
Homer Warwick Sykes is a Canadian-born British documentary photographer whose career has included personal projects and landscape photography.
The Crosby Garrett Helmet is a copper alloy Roman cavalry helmet dating from the late 2nd or early 3rd century AD. It was found by an unnamed metal detectorist near Crosby Garrett in Cumbria, England, in May 2010. Later investigations found that a Romano-British farming settlement had occupied the site where the helmet was discovered, which was located a few miles away from a Roman road and a Roman army fort. It is possible that the owner of the helmet was a local inhabitant who had served with the Roman cavalry.
Patrick Ward is a British photographer who has published collections of his own work on British and other subjects as well as working on commissions for the press.
Upperby is a suburb of Carlisle, in the City of Carlisle district, in the English county of Cumbria. The ward population taken at the 2011 census was 5,476. In 1870-72 the township/chapelry had a population of 595.
Daniel Meadows is an English photographer turned maker of digital stories, and a teacher of photography turned teacher of participatory media.
Jenny Cowern (1943–2005) was a visual, multi-media artist, who took inspiration from the natural surroundings of her adopted county, Cumbria, to produce some of the most dramatic and lasting images of nature. An acute observer of the continual change in the natural world, she took light and reflection, growth and decay, beaches and tides, pebbles and stones, clouds and shadows and manipulated them to capture a unique view of her surroundings. In addition to pen and ink, pencil, oils, watercolours, and pastels, a series of commissions enabled her to employ egg tempera murals, architectural designs, and industrial enamelling techniques. Irrespective of the media employed, it was with felt that she produced her most compelling and remarkable work. In the words of lifelong friend Duncan Smith: "Cowern took an ancient craft, pushed it in thrilling new directions and gave us contemporary pieces of the highest order."
Arthur Lowe was a member of the Nottingham Society of Artists, exhibiting there first in 1898, exhibited twice at the Royal Academy, five times at the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists, four times at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, 99 times at Nottingham Castle Museum and Gallery, Nottingham, and twice at the Royal Cambrian Academy. In 1936, aged over 70 years, he held his first London one-man show exhibiting more than 200 works at the New Burlington Galleries, London.
Ken Grant is a photographer who since the 1980s has concentrated on working class life in the Liverpool area. He is a lecturer in the MFA photography course at the University of Ulster.
Café Royal Books is a small independent publisher of photography photobooks or zines, and sometimes drawing, solely run by Craig Atkinson and based in Southport, England. Café Royal Books produces small-run publications predominantly documenting social, historical and architectural change, often in Britain, using both new work and photographs from archives. It has been operating since 2005 and by mid 2014 had published about 200 books and zines.
Patricia Anne "Tish" Murtha was a British social documentary photographer best known for documenting marginalised communities, social realism and working class life in Newcastle upon Tyne and the North East of England.
Jim A. Mortram is a British social documentary photographer and writer, based in Dereham, Norfolk. His ongoing project using photography and writing, Small Town Inertia, records the lives of a number of disadvantaged and marginalised people living near to his home, in order to tell stories he believes are under-reported. This work is published on his website, in a few zines published in 2013, and in the book Small Town Inertia (2017).
Paddy Summerfield is a British photographer who has lived and worked in Oxford in the UK all his life.