Tricia Porter Photography

There used to be a kind of ‘village’ atmosphere in this area of inner city Liverpool, but much of the property was either in a bad state of repair and was being demolished, or had been bought by the University and was being restored for student accommodation. The local population was being re-housed in outlying districts of the city, and the once tight-knit community was being destroyed.

We began the story by interviewing one of the local shopkeepers, who suggested other people who should be interviewed, who in their turn suggested others and so on. The photographs were exhibited with panels of text by David Porter, who conducted the interviews.

These pictures were exhibited again at the Bluecoat Gallery in Liverpool in 2015

The photographs were featured in the Liverpool Echo. To read the article, click here.

While living in Liverpool 8, I spent a year mingling with children where I was living, in an attempt to make a photo documentary which would be a positive and meaningful statement about my neighbours who had all too often been treated as statistical fodder and sociological phenomena.

The photographs were first exhibited in a local gallery, where the parents and friends of the children who had been photographed organised the private view.

These pictures were exhibited again at the Bluecoat Gallery in Liverpool in 2015

The photographs were featured in the Liverpool Echo. To read the article, click here.

Liverpool’s South Docks were developed through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By the 1970s they had fallen into disuse, with only a few warehouses being used for various businesses. They were a ghost of their bustling past and there was an eerie emptiness about them. In the 1980s the docks, starting with the Albert Dock, were redeveloped and are now one of Merseyside’s top tourist attractions, with shops, museums, bars, restaurants, offices and apartments. They also boast a large marina with berths for 350 yachts. Water sports including canoeing, water-skiing and scuba diving are a popular activity.

After moving from inner city Liverpool the need to photograph an entirely new environment resulted in a two year project photographing the nearby village of Selborne. It is a village which its famous former resident, seventeenth naturalist Gilbert White, would still have recognised.

As part of Industry Year 1986 I was asked by a local gallery to photograph people at work in and around the town of Alton, Hampshire. The places of work varied from farms, an in-shore oil refinery, a prosthetic limb factory, a rubber factory, brick works, a brewery, an architects office - to name but a few. The resulting images were shown in the gallery.

Please enjoy some of the portraits, taken either on commission, during social events or other photography projects. Portraits of the Cornish poet Jack Clemo, his wife Ruth and his mother are part of London's National Portrait Gallery collection.

I came across a book of photographs of vegetables, prize ones, taken by the gardener himself, Charles Jones. A chance find of a trunk of these photographs at an antiques market, by a photographic collector Sean Sexton, brought these to light.

I wanted to show my vegetables, not as prize pieces, but showing them with ‘warts and all’.

Vegetables freshly dug or picked, or seeing them still in the ground or on the plant, is a far cry from shopping in a supermarket among trays of wrapped, scrubbed vegetables tidily trimmed. Few of us have the opportunity to see vegetables in their natural state. Like all growing things, they have their own beauty, environment and individual character

As the exciting age of digital imaging emerged and a complicated darkroom wasn't needed to create colour photographs I became fascinated with adding the colour dimension to my work, which until now was mainly in monochrome. These photographs were taken near my home in East Hampshire.

A large area of sandy scrub land near where I live is owned by the Army and used for recovery training exercises. It holds an incredible wealth of fauna and flora, protected from development by the ownership of the Military. Over time nature invades and envelops the machinations of war.

The only way I would try and learn the names of wild flowers was to go out and photograph them. I try to capture them within their environment rather than from a botanical point of view - here are some of them. Some flowers have several common names. I won't remember the botanical names.