Born in Scotland, living in the Borders town of Galashiels as a child, privileged to have been able to experience ‘the continent’ on holidays from an early age, it didn’t take long for the first pictures to appear in the drawer of holiday snaps my parents kept, perhaps of a duck swimming away or a chateau graphically framed but too small to see, .
My father gave me my first 'real' camera at the age of 12. It was an Olympus Trip he had purchased in Japan - that makes it 1965. I used it throughout my schooldays, and even managed to get an entry included in the annual senior school's arts exhibition that year: a picture of le pont du Gard, which I had developed and printed myself.
From those early days I have taken photos more or less constantly. A camera has never been far from my side, through a journey from Scotland to my current home in Uzès, France, a stone's throw from the aforementioned monument. It’s a journey that has included stints living in Yorkshire, Canada (Calgary and Vancouver), Russia (Moscow) and the USA (Houston, Texas). Having left the corporate world behind, I can invest more time in photography, bringing with it long-term projects, daily interactions and of course the possibility of exhibiting and selling my work.
The photographs I take are of course of the places I have lived, but also of places I have visited, with a particular eye on architecture and food as my personal cultural roadmap. Visual influences were introduced early, not through photography, but through the presence of visionary architect Peter Womersley and artist and textile designer Bernat Klein amongst my parents’ closest friends - I cannot claim any particular personal proximity, but I came to a profound appreciation of the importance of design and the visual world, and a growing recognition of their influence later in life. The constant exposure to their work, not to mention growing up in an open-minded family with access to a fertile intellectual, cultural and of course culinary environment pretty much defined my interests for life.
These are the elements that cause me these days to see life filtered through a 4 x 6 frame.
You can contact me by email at james@jamescolledgephotography.com, or by using the form below.