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Mark Banks
Mark is a professional landscape photographer based in the North East of England. His passion for the subject comes from the love of travel and being outdoors in remote places.
Mark has been teaching landscape photography and post-processing for over 20 years and runs photography workshops around the UK and abroad. He also teaches for the Joe Cornish Gallery and the Royal Photographic Society.
As a Yorkshireman, it slightly grieves me to admit that one of my photographic idols was born in Lancashire! I shall forgive him for that because the elegant simplicity of Michael Kenna’s compositions had a profound impact on how I saw the landscape in my early days of photography. Even now, I can still see influences from his work in some of mine - particularly that of minimalism.
Born in 1953 and from a poor working-class family, Kenna learned about photography for a year at the Banbury School of Art before attending the London College of Printing where he graduated in 1976. He then moved to San Francisco for the opportunity to show and sell his work in galleries. As can be seen from his website, Kenna is well travelled, and I particularly like his project-based mind-set creating a cohesive set of images from each location he visits - something I place a lot of importance to in my work.