Portrait: Benjamin Green – @masta_green
My self-taught photography has developed since my first camera – a Box Brownie – at age 8, to its present form which centres on landscapes rural and urban, and the issues that affect them.
I spent 35 years in corporate life as a marketeer, latterly working as a marketing communications and customer experience specialist using words and pictures to tell stories for customers. When I felt I had done enough there and it was time to move on, I left to become a full-time photographer.
I am now committed to seeing how far I can push my work, creatively and in terms of telling stories about local social, political and environmental issues.
My images currently attempt to explore the interaction between man and the landscape, in the past and in the here and now. I like to find the unusual, the surprising, the quirky and usually ignored. There is much of it out there if one looks and notices.
I am not much interested in single images, but only series or sequences of pictures, which can, together with words, tell real but poetic stories about the world.
I use analogue film, mainly medium format, and a mix of black and white and colour, but the colour is usually pretty muted and subtle. I also like toning my black and white pictures. I like film: it slows me down and makes me concentrate and be more aware.
My photography goes alongside my making hand-made small photobooks. I think that photobooks offer the ideal permanent and structured, but intimate, medium for presenting images such that they can tell stories and make points about the world.
I am also a self-taught graphic designer, typophile, writer, sometime intaglio printmaker, and avid photobook collector.
I have just completed an MA in Photojournalism & Documentary Photography at the London College of Communications, part of the University of the Arts London (UAL / LCC), and am now ambitiously committed to making new books and zines from my existing bodies of work, as well as new work on culture, landscape and man's impact on the world nearby.
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