Nige' Ollis
Bristol, City of Bristol, UK
Photographic History
I'm essentially a self-taught photographer, although did study photography full-time at the highly respected [Magnum took interns for a number of years] Foundation Photography at Filton College, Bristol in 1993/94. As part of the course, that summer I went to London and witnessed renowned street photographer Elliott Erwitt’s extraordinarily inspiring retrospective. Everything changed. I began taking images of people.
After leaving college I began teaching and much of the photography went on the back-burner for the best part of a decade. However, all that changed with my conversion to the digital medium – buoyed by the enthusiasm from having one of my images being in Tate Modern and Tate Britain in the summer/autumn of 2008. I returned to the streets and began producing images that entirely eclipsed my earlier work; the intervening decade and its allied maturity seemingly providing the catalyst for new ways of seeing the world around me; the passion and enthusiasm for the medium came flooding back.
During the past 8 years my growing body of work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally and I’ve continued to expand my vision to revisit the landscape, too.