Professor Paul Wenham-Clarke
"I have been a professional photographer for thirty years and have shot images for a wide variety of commercial and advertising clients, but in recent years I have concentrated on major documentary projects. These have predominantly been environmental portrait series focusing on current UK issues and are often produced in partnership with a charity. Throughout my career I have combined teaching photography with being a practicing professional photographer. I am a professor of photography at the Arts University Bournemouth and a Research Fellow. The university actively supports my research and has funded several of my major projects helping to bring them to wide audiences."
"In 2010 I won an Association Photographers Gold Award for my Hard Times work produced for The Big Issue Foundation. This was a great moment in my career as the award is internationally recognised and previous winners include photographers such as Simon Norfolk and Nadav Kander." The exhibition was shown at the Crypt Gallery, St Martin-in-the-Fields, Trafalgar Square, London and had 112,000 visitors and was featured on the BBC2 Culture Show.
In recent years I have made several bodies of work that focus on our society’s reliance on the automobile and the road network and by examining this research I obtained a Phd by Prior Works at The University of Sunderland entitled ‘Dark Highway: ‘Practice based photographic exploration of the consequences of aspirational consumerism’.
In 2022 I revisited this topic and made a update on my previous work ‘When Lives Collide’ (2004) which once again explores the lives of road crash victims. The new work is titled ‘When Lives Collide 2022’ and was shown at the Gallery@OXO 4-22 Jan 2023 and was featured on BBC London Television.
I find social issues fascinating and I love to make work that has impact and widely engages with the public.