BARRY EAGLESTONE
My journey into photography was born from a curiosity about the world beyond my own. It began in the early 1990s when I started visiting countries, initially Syria and Jordan, in what was known then as the developing world. That was followed by travels to countries deeper along the ancient Silk Road. This took me to some of the great, historic sites and legendary places of the ancient world such as Damascus, Petra, Kashgar, Gilgit, Registan Square etc. It took me along the recently opened Karakoram Highway, following the path of the Silk Road alongside the Indus River as it made its way spectacularly through one of the most mountainous regions in the World.
These places were mesmerizing but I was just as captivated by the vibrancy of the cultures, the pulse of life on the streets and the striking array of colours that were an integral part of everyday life. It was this that inspired my photography. I then went on to visit other special countries such as Ethiopia and Tibet and had the good fortune to go before tourism got to them. It was before the internet existed and these were places in the World that were long-distance travel outside Europe. They were remote and offered no Western comforts. Visited by relatively few people back then, they were something of a mystery. Consequently, part of my motivation for taking up photography was to be able to give friends a glimpse into the world of these colourful and charismatic places and people. The people and the places were the inspiration for the title People, Moments, Places when I created a (well-regarded) website of that name in the mid-1990s and have continued to use variations of this title today for recent solo exhibitions of my work.
Those photographs, shot on film in a pre-digital era, have unwittingly become an anecdotal record of parts of the world and cultures that in many cases have changed considerably and irrevocably in the last three decades. Because of this, I have devoted one page of my website to show again some of those images. I hope you also find them fascinating.
From being so passionate about photography, I stopped altogether suddenly after just five years. It was the realisation that I was no longer seeing the places I was visiting because I was so focused on looking for the photograph. I sold my camera and took no photographs at all for something like 15 years.
However, about 10 years ago, a simple mobile phone camera re-ignited my interest. Taking the occasional ‘snap’ led to the purchase of a pocket camera. Inevitably that wasn’t good enough either. At the end of 2019, I took the plunge and bought a ‘proper’ camera once more and what you see here is the result. All the photographs (with two exceptions) were taken in the last four years and were shot without a tripod, without a flash, without filters.
