First off: all my pictures are my own, and no one — not even the Romans — may use any of them in a gallery, feature or otherwise without my authorisation, following notice of the terms and my acknowledgement, understanding and acceptance of said terms, which from henceforth shall be known to mean, and thus substitute for, the words Terms & Conditions.

 

I started taking photographs at eight years old using an old Kodak Brownie. I don’t know whose it was, but by eighteen I had trained as a black-and-white printer, worked as a portrait photographer, bought a Nikon, a Rolleiflex and a 5 × 4 plate camera, and moved to London.

 

Model bookers are the secret weapon of the photographer’s assistant.

 

With the help of two brilliant model bookers, I landed work with some of my then-favourite photographers by crashing their exhibitions. Make enough fuss at the door about not being on the list and they will let you in eventually.

 

That sort of thing impresses a photographer at that level because he is looking for someone who can get things done.

 

Honest, guv.

 

From there, I jumped into jobs with some of my photographic idols, including David Bailey, Terry O’Neill, John Swannell, Terence Donovan, Herb Ritts and Bruce Weber, working at various rental studios around Primrose Hill and the West End.

 

Soon I was assisting many of the other leading editorial and advertising photographers in the country, while also gaining clients of my own at magazines and newspapers.

 

I stuck around the gallery scene to network because it saves so much bloody legwork. People — clients — tend to use the people they know, so you have to become one of the faces they know. That’s that.

 

I took my first pictures of models through Jonathan Phang at Synchro Model Agency and worked with Sarah Doukas at Storm Models, as well as Models One and Take Two Management, specialising in fashion and beauty photography.

 

After that period, I turned back towards portraiture.

 

My first exhibition, HEADS, took place in 1999. Afterwards, I travelled to the United States and began doing much the same thing again, only this time applying it to the film industry.

 

Soon I found myself schmoozing in Hollywood, where I diversified the direction of my career, made lots of new friends and parlayed photographing actors into working as a script reader.

 

That led to directing a short film and then morphed into a new career as a writer and director, fulfilling a long-held ambition.

 

Circa 2022, I was running my own public relations company, Goldsmith PR, as a consultant. Now it's called The Public Relations Dept.

 

Throughout all of it, I have continued to shoot pictures, and or video nearly every day. I love what I do.

 

UPDATE: 15 JULY 2026

 

From 2022 onwards, after various trials, changes in my life and professional events, I decided to go back to what I love: art photography.

 

You might call it fine-art photography, but to me it is simply something I have always done — taking pictures of people, places and things that feel worth preserving.

 

HEADS was really my first proper fine-art project, and I loved making it.

 

I came from a fashion and editorial background, so I could take the discipline I had learned there and apply it to something far more personal.

 

HEADS was about making a connection with the person I was photographing in that room.

 

The studio was on the top floor of the Phoenix in Brighton. It was a wonderful long room with two white walls and two walls made almost entirely of windows.

 

The light coming in from the sea was amazing. It moved and changed throughout the day and gave the room an atmosphere of its own.

 

I met and photographed a tattooist, a piercing freak, artists’ models, musicians and ordinary working people. They all entered the same room and were photographed with the same attention.

 

It wasn’t really about status, fashion or celebrity. It was about the person standing in front of me and whatever happened between us while I was taking the picture.

 

The finished photographs were produced as 3 × 4 ft bromide prints, sandwiched between two thick sheets of Perspex with a border. Each piece was held together by a huge nut and long bolt in every corner, and hung from those corner fixings.

 

The whole thing was an amazing experience, both for me and for the people who took part.

 

It showed me that I could take everything I had learned from fashion, editorial photography, portraiture, lighting, large-format cameras and the darkroom, and use it to make work that existed for itself.

 

That is really where my new work begins.

 

Not with the idea of becoming something different, but by returning to something I had already found: taking pictures of what is worth seeing, remembering and preserving.