A life that began when I inherited my Dad’s pretty ancient, Ross Ensign range-finder film camera (first left of the cameras above). During the three years I spent travelling around Europe, I developed a natural affinity for photography and decided to take things further by enrolling on a three year course at the School of Photography in Birmingham – a mature student at the ripe old age of 27.
Inset is Jeff Cooper, friend and college tutor for all three years.
Graduating from college in 1975, I found work as a photo-journalist on the bizarrely named “Kidderminster Shuttle”, a local paper in the English town of the same name. Photography included everything from golden wedding anniversaries, to local heroes, to features to unusual events at locals schools…
A year in, with an Arts Council grant, I exhibited a series of photographs at the Ludlow Festival, based on the vintage book “Around About The Crooked Steeple” by Simon Evans. It toured the English Midlands, finishing in Denmark. Simon’s story and some of the photographs can be seen HERE.
Four years later, I relocated to Ireland to team up with ex-college alumni, Jaimie Blandford in Slidefile, a Dublin based advertising, industrial and commercial photography studio, that gradually morphed into Ireland’s first stock picture agency. The Irish Marketing Journal featured us in the early days, the story and photograph of a much younger us can be read HERE. It’s a fact that agencies are only as good as the images they hold, so while co-directing the enterprise, I retained the role of picture editor, and continued to shoot stock photography throughout Ireland.
Following radical changes in the industry after the millennium, Slidefile wound up and I left Dublin for the tranquility of the County Waterford coast to run a niche agency called The Irish Image Collection. But nothing lasts. When digital imagery became the norm, the “one man agency” became almost extinct and I returned to freelance photography for a variety of clients, chiefly Tourism Ireland. I also began writing illustrated stories for magazines like “Ireland of the Welcomes” and the “Irish Garden”
Simultaneously, a niche to teach digital photography appeared and I established and ran Copper Coast Workshops for two or three years in the loft studio below.
Back to the future: gradually age caught up, old muscles needed Mediterranean heat, so my wife and I migrated to Frigiliana, an ancient Moorish village on the Andalucian coast. And it’s here, the opportunity to work on my to-do list of photography and books got under way.
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George Munday Creative 