People come to photography in different ways. I'm always intrigued at the variety of reasons for which my friends became photographers, none of them incidentally through the predictable route of a photographic education. For myself, I took an MA in Geography at Oxford, which I imagine had a latent effect on the amount I travelled later, but I then went into advertising. After a few years the agency, with extraordinary generosity, gave me a three-month sabbatical to travel up the Amazon, which I did with a second-hand camera, and after the trip I knew what I wanted to do. My encouragement came from Time-Life, who used the pictures for the cover of a new book on the Amazon and for several spreads inside. They became my first client and I changed my career.

Travel and reportage have been central to my work, and over the years this has leaned towards Asia, particularly Southeast Asia, India and more recently, Japan. Within these, and even apart, certain special interests grew, including art. design, architecture, science and technology, and anthropology (the Oxford degree included a Diploma course in this). You can see these various specialities among the magazine stories featured here, and in the book titles. I do a lot of books. They are a publishing format I understand well, they allow me to explore a subject in depth, and when this is something about which I know sufficient, I write also.

All of this — and after nearly thirty years it adds up — has been supported by a range of clients. These were contracted assignments, but most were more than just work. They were opportunities to photograph in special, often privileged circumstances. Over the last twenty years the most supportive of all my clients has been the Smithsonian magazine. I began working for the magazine shortly after it was launched, and since then have shot more than forty stories for it. The editors and picture editors indulged me in some marathon logistics in executing some unlikely-sounding stories, from the Birth and Death of the Universe to Birds' Nest Soup to Psychoneuroimmunology (yes, that's what I thought when the script arrived). You can see these and more by clicking on the magazine cover at left.

My professional dealings with science and technology, prompted by the Smithsonian through a number of assignments that obliged me to learn something about physics, cosmology, medicine and so on, no doubt encouraged my interest in digital imaging. It is, admittedly, a world apart from reportage, but it's still a pity that each of these ends of the photography spectrum seems unwilling to accept the other. I learned special effects in order to make sense visually of science stories, and I learned principally from the motion picture industry (see my story on Industrial Light and Magic). These were optical effects, in the camera or in the darkroom and pre-digital. When computing reached the processing power, speed and memory to be able to take over, I took it on. I appreciate that this does not suit everyone, but personally I am delighted to apply digital procedures when I need them, while at the same time shooting straightforward, unaffected reportage. I have no confusion between the two, and I show both on this website. The differences are obvious.

And then there are the books and courses on photography. If you are visiting the site to research pictures, this will probably not interest you very much, but I have been involved in teaching photography for a long time, with some two dozen books written and more than a million copies sold. One book received the Prix Louis Philippe Clerc from the French Ministry of Culture, and I also designed and wrote the United Kingdom's Open College of the Arts photography courses. As we're now in an Internet age, I also have a teaching site, the Online School of Photography, the first of its kind.

That's what I do. you can see the results under Images or Search, and we're adding constantly to the selection, all of it available for licensing. There's a huge backlog of transparencies being digitized. We're working on that. And there is a string of new projects this year. I'm working on those, too.

We're in London, England, and are happy to answer any queries. Between us, we can usually handle calls in English, French, Spanish and Japanese (it depends on who's in the office at the time). If from the lists, books and stories there's a picture that you think we should have but can't find it here on the website,
please ask us — it will be a long time before we digitize everything.

4 Callcott Street
London W8 7SU
United Kingdom
t: +44 20 7229 3977
f: +44 20 7229 3788
e: michaelhfreeman@btinternet.com