Paul Skillen
Perth, Western Australia, Australia
Well, I suppose you want to know a bit about me? I don’t know why. Like my photographs, I am pretty mundane, some would even say boring.
I was born in 1968 into an Army family, in the United Kingdom, so I was fortunate to travel through my formative years. This gave me a fine appreciation of everything around me, and also a feeling of being slightly displaced from society, along with and insatiable wanderlust.
As a family we finally settled in Swindon, Wiltshire, in 1978 after my father left the army, and joined the police. I continued to feel slightly different and displaced from everyone around me, and was able, thanks to a Zenit camera given as a birthday gift, to start recording the world around me. My passion for photography was born.
In the years since, I left school, young, having become bored. I started, and finished many jobs, including Real Estate salesman, baker, car sales, repo man, and removalist. I eventually followed my father into the police, and managed a relatively healthy 12 year career. This enabled me to emigrate to Perth, Western Australia, as part of a recruiting campaign the West Australian police undertook, encouraging British officers to relocate. My career with WAPOL didn’t last long, and now, I work within the fly in, fly out (FIFO) world.
I have never lost my passion for photography, and, thanks to early influences such as, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, Kent Gavin, Don McCullin and Larry Burrows, to name but a few, was able to work for a few years as a freelance news photographer in the UK.
During all of this time, and all of these careers, the feeling of being displaced from the rest of society has continued. My influences changed, to people such as William Eggleston, Martin Parr, Josef Hoflehner, Alec Soth, Paul Seawright and Simon Roberts. People, who seem to see the world around them, just slightly differently.
- Arts
- Breaking news
- Editorial
- Environment
- Landscape
- Portrait
