Christopher Deere is a freelance writer and photographer who lives in his home town of Melbourne, in Australia, although he has also lived in many other parts of the country. For more than twenty years he has written about and photographed a number of humanitarian, social justice and environmental issues, such as the growth of community gardens in urban areas and the lives of the Roma (Gypsy) people of Eastern Europe. His work has appeared in such publications as The Australian, The Age, The Sunday Age, The Canberra Times, The Melbourne Times, Meanjin, Chain Reaction, The Big Issue and Eureka Street. He has worked as a portrait studio photographer and as a writer of computer books and articles, but now his main focus is on documentary and narrative journalism and photojournalism. He travelled to the Indonesian island of Java soon after the earthquake of May 2006 to photograph the work of such aid agencies as Australian Aid International, the Australian Red Cross, Medecins sans Frontieres and the Indonesian Search and Rescue Service. More recently, he travelled to Thailand to record the lives of Burmese refugees in the border town of Mae Sot, and to Cambodia to report on a community that had been forcibly displaced from its home in Phnom Penh. He is also interested in recording the lives of people in socially-specific settings, such as the homeless or the residents of public housing estates, and seeks to convey some realisation about the many different characters and circumstances that make up a wider human community.

Christopher Deere can be contacted at christopherdeere@gmail.com.