The beginning (part 1)

Where to begin? If this was a movie, this would be the scene where I was tied up, with the baddies, about to torture me and I explain to the audience in what is going on.

Well it all started last February. I wasn’t in a good place. I was frustrated, with money worries and generally not happy with life. I would spend hours at night worrying about the business and how to get work. A good professional photographer is a good businessman, foremost and unfortunately I am not that person. I understand the concepts of running a business but when it comes to putting it all into practice, it just doesn’t work. My brain isn’t wired to run a business.

This has become more and more apparent over the last few years.and slowly but surely I realised that I cannot run my own business successfully. So that night, in February I decided that things had to change. But how?

I wish I could remember, how the idea of selling up and going back to university came about. I do know that University always felt like unfinished business and that I was disappointed with my time at University 20+ years ago. I also had come to realise that, the one big asset I had, with was my home, could be sold and I could afford to try and do something different.

Also, during lockdown. in a 2 month period, I managed to put together a group of work that won me, South East photographer of the Year, just think what I could do in a Year, just focusing on photography. I would be able to build up an awesome portfolio and one of the big advantages of going to University would be that I would have to work to various deadlines.

Some how, the idea of me selling up and going back to University, came together, over night. The next day, I went into a meeting with various other photographers, expecting the idea to be shot down but it wasn’t. In fact they were all rather enthusiastic about it.

I continued to think about the idea over a couple of weeks. Looking at various universities. Initially, I thought of moving as far away from London as possible. Looking at Aberdeen and did have a nice conversation with lecture at Robert Gordon University but after due consideration and conversations with friends. I realised that whilst the move might be nice, I would need to find work afterwards and I just didn’t think I would be able to up in Scotland.

After a couple of weeks, I decided to apply for a few Universities to do my photography Masters degree. I wrote to lecturers at The University of the West of England (UWE). They didn’t get back to me but was told to apply through admissions, which I did but despite continuing to not get any replies and it soon became very obvious, that they were not interested in me and I was rejected, with the standard ‘blah, blah, high standard, blah blah, lots of students applying, etc, etc’.

I won’t speculate, as to why they were not interested in me? I have no idea. My ego tells me that they were scared of having an award winning photographer on the course and that it is a lot easier to teach 20 year olds, then someone like me but in reality I probably just wasn’t the the kind of photographer they were looking for.

I also applied to Coventry University. This was very much my back up University. It didn’t seem particularly exciting but was close enough to be able to get to Birmingham or London quite easily, for work, after graduating.

The last and most exciting course for me was not a pure photography course and that was the MA at The University of the Creative Arts. There are only a couple of Universities that have a course on Fashion Photography and UCA intrigued me. Rochester was only 30 miles from where I lived and is easily in reach of London.

More importantly, I could see a path with Fashion photography and the kinds of photography I enjoyed, with was portraiture. They are similar but different. My style of photography suits magazine photography and the mixing the skills from my portraiture with what I can learn from doing a course in fashion photography could really help me.

Unlike UWE, I soon got a reply from UCA and had a conversation with Jason Lee the course leader. I was pretty much instantly sold after that. I pretty much knew I was gong to get an offer and the day I got my rejection from UWE, I accepted my offer from UCA and contacted Coventry university saying that I was withdrawing my application.