Michael C Hughes - Photography & Creative

I have always been drawn towards a cross between fine art and social documentary photography. On a personal level I am continually interested in the themes of loss and memory, and my creative work embraces these themes quite naturally as I combine both image making and my writing.

Prior to the pandemic, I had also begun to explore ways of incorporating my image making into sculptural and installation based pieces. Personally I find it fascinating to introduce a non-replication aspect to my work (especially in a digital age of instant reproduction). I enjoy the sense of theatre that this brings to the process and it creates a need to experience the work in place rather than simply consuming an image through a browser.

This exploratory work can be simply through very large format prints, book publishing designs and fully three dimensional work, such as with the Oriental Hearth project.

However, more recently (and in many ways driven by the pandemic and finding oneself ‘landlocked’), my creative energy has diversified even further. In photographic terms I have been self-teaching myself the art of hand-tinting my black and white images using transparent oil paints; a process popular in the latter part of the 19th and early 20th century. Whilst concurrently working on a large winged sculpture using locally sourced ‘found’ wood.

Michael has spent his working life in the visual arts and design industry. He has an MA in Photography from the University of Brighton and also founded and runs a B Corp digital design agency based in Brighton, England.