Tim Richmond is an British photographer, a graduate of the London College of Printing in film and photography. For over 25 years Richmond has photographed for international publications including L’Uomo Vogue, Vanity Fair, Telegraph Magazine, World of Interiors, GQ, and Nowness.
Since 2008 he has concentrated on his long-term documentary projects. The first of which, ‘Last Best Hiding Place’ (2007-2014) was published to acclaim in 2015. After intensely studying cinema, Richmond discovered his “colour palette” through the application of a cinematographers’ device, where the hand processed negative retains some silver, yielding a unique subtle de-saturation in the prints. Thereafter the printing is a heartfelt, poetic process, guided by memories of the moment that the shutter clicked.
Richmond’s prints are housed in many private collections and his work has been exhibited in a range of shows that include Brugge Photo Festival, Rencontres d’Arles, Grimaldi Gavin and Musee de l’Elysee. He has also been published widely in Nowness, Photomonitor, GUP Magazine, Another Magazine, Raw View Magazine.
About ‘Love Bites’:
On a rainy November day, Tim Richmond sat next to a young man at a bus stop. The lad, supping on a can of cider, sported a massive hickey on his neck. The image was stark. “He just sat there and waited for the bus with that enormous trophy of victorious passion from the night before,” says Richmond. “There was something so fantastically cinematic about that.”
Cocksure yet slightly misanthropic, the boy had an aura about him. Richmond never made his portrait and has not re-encountered the young lad in the past three years, but this chance meeting gave Richmond focus and the series a title; ‘Love Bites’.
Richmond is known for his wanderings and with this body of work he wanders into damp seaside towns and muddy estuaries, encountering a particular cast of transvestites, homeless, Latvian pole dancers; the overlooked fringes residing in a small, distinct region along the Bristol Channel. The high-octane life of mainstream England races past this unheralded cast by choice, or for socio-economic reasons. There is uncertainty about what has led to this and what might come next. ‘Love Bites’ captures a certain authentic reality and has ties with the notion of a “Broken Britain”, yet it remains a document filled with hopes and dreams.
These photographs are informed by a strong sense of documentary realism, the style leaning towards the cinematic, taking cues from British Realist filmmakers such as Andrea Arnold’s ‘Fish Tank’, Pawel Pawlikowski’s ‘Last Resort’, Shane Meadows’ ‘This is England’ and Ken Loach’s ‘Kes’. Strong narrative elements scatter the images resulting in an open-ended dialogue of the moment passed, or the one about to happen. These are images without an end, or a beginning, yet revealing stories. The more specific they are, the more universal they become.
