On Thursday 7th August Smethwick PS will welcome our good friend Mr Leigh Preston for a photography journey unlike any other. This week’s lecture is a change to the one originally advertised (that will come later in the year). This time Leigh will talk about genres of photography he’s not normally known for. Leigh will be presenting live in the clubroom.

Much of Leigh’s work is about the urban environment, depicting a changing industrial landscape or portfolio work in far-flung locations. 

Over the past 40 years he has travelled in the USA to the empty Prairies or in deserts, to Greenland, Iceland, Norway, the Baltic, the mountainous areas of the UK to find winter landscapes or the exact opposite in Australia. Trips  to Cuba, India and Georgia, gave opportunities for reportage style of portraiture. 

To avoid being forever known as ‘Mills & Gloom’,  recent work has been about street characters, humour or aspects of absurdity, making images at rock concerts and tackling architectural abstracts. Leigh prefers to work alone, influenced by the environment he grew up with, and the photography of Bill Brandt, John Gray, Michael Kenna and the artists L.S.Lowry and Atkinson Grimshaw. Lyricism and narrative have become increasingly important in the documentary work he is now producing, linking influences such as J.B. Priestly, Jonathan Raban, Beryl Bainbridge alongside songwriters like Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and Roger Waters, and the composer Vaughan Williams and Sibelius.

Leigh has also produced and published four books of his pictures – ‘Shadows of Change’, ‘Five Essays’, ‘Editions’ and very recently ‘Liverpool, a Place Apart’ which depict the various aspects of his photography as outlined above. He is a double Fellow of the RPS, and holds FIAP and PAGB distinctions, has taught photography for Gloucester and Cheltenham colleges, for Jessops, Permajet and on landscape workshops, both in the UK and abroad.

Starts at 8pm in the club room and on stream