Simon Hipkins

I was born in Lancashire in the North West of England in 1979, and grew up in an artistic household where I painted, took photographs and wrote stories from a very young age. After leaving school at 16 to go to a local art college, I then moved to Scotland to study photography and film.

During this time, I began to travel widely and meet new people whenever I could afford to do so. It was on one of these journeys, accompanying a fellow student on his return to the Ukraine in 1999, that I picked up a video camera and made my first documentary film. For the next eleven years I worked solely in the moving image as a cameraman, director and editor. I continued to take photographs whenever I could but often left the negatives untouched.

After moving to London I began to work in fiction as a cinematographer and director. One of these films, ‘The Last Regal Kingsize’ (2008) was nominated for a BAFTA and won the ‘Best Fiction’ prize at the Tehran International Short Film Festival, 2009. In order to prepare for this film I started to use photography again and began to revisit the other stills I had taken over the years. Drawn to the different way they reflected the times I’d lived through I rediscovered my passion for photography.

Over the last two years I have been building my confidence again as a photographer and in 2011 started work on my first photostory.

Commercially, I continue to work as a cameraman, shooting commercials, documentary and drama features. Aside from this, I work purely on self-initiated documentary photography projects and narrative films.