I’m one of five photographers who are forming a kind of warm-up act of short talks on Wed 2 October at White Cloth Gallery in Leeds, where Tom Stoddart‘s exhibition opens that very same day. Tom will also be talking – looks like a fun evening. More information is available here.

It’s funny really but I met and had had a few chats with Tom Stoddart four summers ago, when I was really new to photography and had no idea who he was, in fact I’d never heard his name…I then kept confusing him in my mind with the playwright Tom Stoppard. It was the first day of Appleby Horse Fair in Cumbria and I was determined to find my way into a Gypsy family for the event, but had not yet got anywhere. He said he was shooting photos for an exhibition of British culture he was preparing for the London Olympics year. It was cold for June, was quite early in the morning and was grey and drizzling. I had just grown bored of taking rather clichéd photos of men washing and grooming horses in the river in the centre of the village, when a quietly spoken man in a black fleece – with three cameras around his neck (one of which I later learned was a Rolliflex) – started talking to me. There was something different about him to the army of geeky and intense prosumer photographers with massive lenses and huge back packs who were elbowing each other in the shallows. I recall I wasn’t really in the mood for chatting with other photographers – I woudn’t even have taken the liberty of calling myself a photographer back then and felt I’d be found out as a fraud at any moment – but he was really sweet and encouraging and it turned out he knew John Easterby, the lecturer from London College of Communication who was shortly due to interview me for my MA course. I recall him being really humble about his own achievements, so it was quite a surprise when I looked him up online. If you don’t know his work you should definitely look here. Appleby ended up going quite well for me and was definitely instrumental in giving me the confidence to work more with photography and to focus first on the English Romani community and later the European Roma…a nice little circle for me. Wonder if Tom would recall this meeting, I guess probably not.