Humans at Work

Mark Reeves

ARPS is self-taught photographer now living in North West England. Having grown up in Fife, he lived for many years in London before spending five years travelling around England with his partner on a canal boat and then settling to live on the coast of the Wirral. His work has been exhibited in Waterloo Station in London, in the World Museum in Liverpool and various galleries in the North West. As well as being active on climate change within the RPS he is also the events manager for the Society’s specialist landscape group. Mark also gives regular talks to camera clubs and teaches photography on a part-time basis.

In the early 1980s, I graduated from Edinburgh University with an honours degree in Environmental Chemistry. My final year research dissertation examined chemical processes involved in the destruction of the ozone layer.

I never went on to pursue a scientific career because, back then, environmentalism really wasn’t taken seriously and there were very few jobs that weren’t about trying to keep the big polluters just about on the right side of the law.

My interest in, and concerns for, environmental matters have never waned though, and it is this interest that led to the creation of my audiovisual 'Humans at Work project'.

Primarily a landscape photographer, I am particularly interested in creating impressionistic rather than literal representations of the landscape, with a lot of my work featuring ICM, double exposures and other in-camera techniques. In my pursuit of satisfying impressions of the landscape, I noticed that I was producing images that had a very foreboding feel to them. At first, this wasn’t a conscious choice; it was just the way that I felt the images needed to be processed. I then decided to bring these images together into a body of work to be featured on my website.