ABOUT JONATHAN

Photographer and Author

Since the tender age of single digits, the Kodak Brownie had me fascinated.
Group pictures of class mates secured a life long love affair with the world
according to silver halide.

It was a photo of a young beauty set to embrace the Central London Polyechnic as a student of photography that determined the course I subsequently chose.That it was a Fleet Street rag foreign edition, read whilst sitting at a charming café in Grenoble France, allegedly attending university, would also have import to my future career.

Three years later I graduated into my first major assignments in Fleet Street, as a photo-journalist, only to discover why that beauty never made the course. It was to be my first lesson in how the press makes up the news rather than reports it. A useful lesson for latter years.

The virulent culture that was the press media made me spread my wings falling into the heady world of advertising. The mid -seventies and eighties saw extravagance of budgets define an era. It offered a baseboard from whence to raise my game and reputation in one of the most entertaining and creative industries, at the the height of its folly.

Gene Nocon friend photographic printer, photographer, genius

My work exhibited from London, New York, Amsterdam, Paris and Tokyo, led to many international commissions as reputation spread.

Working, from almost day one, with black and white printer Gene Nocon, a Filipino/American brother now sadly passed, made my work into what I could have only dreamed of. His reputation had him advising within royal palaces, aristocratic piles and the studios of other great photographers, such as Karsh, Beaton, Parkinson and Avedon. He was an eternally accomplished master of the art of photography, both within and outside the darkroom, and my best pal who taught me so much.

As the nineties took their toll and realization of the shallow ethics of the advertising industry sank in becoming even less mine in their overbearing arrogance, I stepped back at the height of an incredible career to embrace photography through my own interpretation and the new wonders of web based technology. It also allowed me to reincorporate my writing skills, setting me on a parallel and absorbing path as author.

Both flourished, in their very different forms of creativity. Digital imagery, never to be mistaken for photography as analogue, swept new generations into a world previously occupied by those who, like every great artistic expression, invested decades to reach the heights of becoming truly 'masters of their craft'. These newcomers, with pixelation in their holsters, became the "Great Pretenders" of creative form. At the same time technology cheapened a previously exclusive manor and gave the impression that anyone with an image making device could be a photographer.

This once more polluted an art transcendent of such immediate normalcy and saw many professional photographers massacred on the beaches of mediocrity and social networking.

The images and artwork I present here are a mixture of original, unique and totally unreproducable silver halide photography as well as digital imagery per se and photography reproduced in digital archival print form.

One, a unique archival collectors treasure, the other archival printing in digital reproduction of photography as created by one of the last original artists of this particular form.

I very much look forward to your feedback as I expand the collection.