<\/p>\n
Photographer Simon Wheeler has reached a stage in his life that a lot of people will find very familiar: his children have all gone back to university and the house seems deathly quiet. For many, this is a time of reflection. It is a time when we can take stock and look at what we have achieved over the years, especially the ones that went by in a blur while our children grew from tiny pink dolls to confident members of the community.<\/p>\n
Busily working on the launch of his first website, with literally tens of thousands of images at his fingertips – as well as buried in storage boxes \u2013 Simon is uniquely positioned to use an enormous body of work and experience to launch himself into the next phase of his career. He is also \u2013 perhaps not so uniquely \u2013 now able to muse on the missed opportunities of high speed youth. An opportunity to meet Lord Snowdon for example, was missed because he \u2018simply couldn\u2019t be bothered\u2019. I suspect there are few of us that haven\u2019t at some point realised how little we saw of life when we were too busy being busy. However, regardless of missed opportunities, Simon Wheeler can use a wealth of imagery to show he has made good use of exceptional talents in his career to date.<\/p>\n
Educated at Headfort, a small prep school in Kells outside Dublin, followed by St Columba\u2019s College, he never seriously thought about following the family tradition into medicine and even walked away from a place at Trinity College in Dublin. In St Columbus he ran the photographic club but was also \u2018mad keen\u2019 on sports, playing in both the hockey and the rugby firsts. \u201cAcademically I was pretty average\u201d he remembers \u201cand though I managed to scrape a place into Trinity College, I decided to come to London to pursue my interest in photography. In those days Ireland was a real backwater.\u201d This was not before his flair for imagery got him a first exhibition in the Photographer\u2019s Gallery in Dublin, where he showed black and white nudes of his then girlfriend, along with West of Ireland landscapes. He was recently asked to supply a couple of his first photographs to be hung at St Columba\u2019s College.<\/p>\n
He came to London, joined a studio and learned his photography in the old fashioned apprenticeship style, but quickly found himself sucked into the busy, exciting and heady world of advertising and editorial. He worked for big names like BAA, Swatch, Cat, Silk Cut, Range Rover and Wedgwood. He also worked prolifically for English and American House and Garden, French Elle, The World of Interiors, Arkitectur und Wohnung, Stern, Weltbild, Sunday Times, Conde Nast Traveller, Observer Life, Vogue and Tatler. He worked seven days a week doing both advertising and editorial and remembers the excitement of being busy. \u201cWhen you\u2019re in the mix of all those people \u2013 and we were all about the same age \u2013 it was a great buzz. And you all think you\u2019re God\u2019s gift to humanity \u2013 even I did, secretly\u201d. It was part of the roller coaster ride of being freelance. \u201cWe were all totally passionate about what we were doing. We\u2019d work till 3 in the morning, working weekends, cancelling our holidays and so on\u201d. And although, for a time, his expertise gave him a lucrative career, he spent much of it shying away from the work that would eventually define his style. The bulk of his work in those days was still life. \u201cI wasn\u2019t a particularly confident young person,\u201d he says. \u201cIf I\u2019d had a bit more confidence I probably should have gone into more fashion and reportage work. Now after 15 years of doing still life I\u2019ve gone back to that. That\u2019s been a really good move, although financially it\u2019s not nearly as well paid as still life.\u201d<\/p>\n
The reason he gave up still life was because he didn\u2019t want to be stuck in a studio photographing a fig roll for three days. \u201cI was completely detached from my children\u201d he says. \u201cI would come back in the middle of the night, never see them, all that sort of thing. It had to change\u201d. It was that need for change that eventually helped create the style of food photography that makes his work stand apart from so many others. Most people here is the Westcountry will know him from his work on Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall\u2019s River Cottage books, however a few years before then, his first full book commission was Tamasin Day Lewis\u2019s West of Ireland Summers. He remembers how the plan to photograph it all in black & white was changed after he had already left London and arrived in the West of Ireland to do the shoot. \u201cI did have some reservations\u201d he says. \u201cI hadn\u2019t even packed any colour film. In fact at one point I even said I wouldn\u2019t do it, but Tamasin just said \u2018Oh don\u2019t be silly Simon, just go into the village and get some colour film from the chemist\u2019, so I got on with it\u201d. Although now out of print and hard to find, the book gives an early hint of the humour and personality that was to characterise his later work with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. It is a relaxed, off-beat style that really brings a cookery book to life.<\/p>\n
He remembers how life was at the original River Cottage in Dorset. \u201cHugh did lead a very, very simple life when I first met him. He was literally living in this tiny damp cottage by the river with his girlfriend. It was pretty rough inside, there were no frills at all. We produced that little book not knowing whether it would be any good or not. Now ten or twelve years on he has become extremely successful with all the things that that brings, but basically Hugh could crash down on a bit of an old sofa in a wooden hut up the Himalayas any day. It wouldn\u2019t bother him.\u201d The River Cottage Cook Book was hugely influential and won the Andre Simon Food Book of the Year Award, the Guild of Food Writers\u2019 Michael Smith Award and the Glenfiddich Trophy and Food Book of the Year.<\/p>\n
Simon has gone on to collaborate with Hugh on all the major River Cottage books and also brought his keen eye to books by Heston Blumenthal, Monty Don, Lindy Wildsmith and Anthony Demetre, to name a few. His style is utterly unique, bringing a depth and character that elevates good writing, brings life to recipes and helps carry a narrative that wouldn\u2019t necessarily be there without him. His work adds extra levels of personality to each book. I asked him how that style developed. \u201cI just didn\u2019t want to lug all that equipment around anymore\u201d he laughs. \u201cBut the truth is it was also a way of getting away from the tediousness and technicality of still life. I decided to kick all that technical stuff into touch. I wanted to get to the moment. You want to get under the skin of whatever the project is and go about it your own way. You try and work together with the person your working with and think, \u2018How can I best try and tell this story\u2019. And I developed a style that I think is really a slightly glamorised snapshot.\u201d<\/p>\n
Glamorised snapshot may be a good description but it is also an obvious understatement. His work manages to combine honesty and humour whilst portraying the positive side of his subject. He uses the example of photographing an animal being slaughtered. \u201cI don\u2019t really want to make it look like hell\u201d he says, \u201cbecause you could so easily do that. It\u2019s so easy to make it look awful. It\u2019s actually much more difficult to make it look real but quite optimistic. So what I try to do is to tell real stories, but just make it optimistic instead of deeply depressing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lately he has turned his talents to design and production, photographing and designing company reports and books such as Medina Kitchen, a North African food and travel book, plus a brochure for Anta, produced on location in Lapland. Simon can be contacted on simonwheeler@onetel.com.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Photographer Simon Wheeler has reached a stage in his life that a lot of people will find very familiar: his children have all gone back to university and the house seems deathly quiet. For many, this is a time of reflection. It is a time when we can take stock and look at what we […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":439,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[13],"class_list":["post-171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-features","tag-fergus-byrne"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=171"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/439"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}