sp.
Spid has that incredible skill of drawing the viewer into his work through design and he has spent years perfecting his craft. As a photographer, Spid is hands-on, authentic, approachable, down-to-earth, relaxed, professional.
He was largely self-taught until he arrived in London in 1992 and attended the Drill Hall Art School. When he returned to New Zealand he won a study grant from the Ronald Woolf Memorial Trust, which he used to study graphic and photographic design.
He likes to get involved at an early stage of a commission, he checks out the locations himself and starts a relationship with the talent by being involved in the casting. He wants subjects who are on the same page as he is and are prepared to “push out the boat” resulting in those beautiful moments of spontaneity and a sense of freedom in his images.
The rapport that Spid establishes with the talent is reflected in his engaging and character-driven portraits. This, he believes, is the most important aspect of his job. Making a connection with his subject allows him to elicit moments of spontaneity that bring freedom and fun into often-humorous, quirky images.
Spid’s images reflect a fascination with the subtleties of people’s faces which display their inner selves. That’s part of the challenge—digging into a subject’s soul to draw out those nuances in expression that each tell a different story.
Spid is proud to have created stunning images for fantastic companies and produced exquisite art prints that grace the walls of many happy customers. Along the way, he has been selected from thousands of submissions by photographers worldwide for the next Lürzer's Archive 2020/2021 edition.