Toby Webster
I was born in 1959 in rural Essex, where I still live.
I studied art and photography as a student in the 1970s, but found a career in the wine trade, where I still work, running my own company, Black Dog Wines, which specialises in wines from high quality, artisan scale producers. With the aquisition of a digital SLR a few years ago I rediscovered my love for documentary landscape photography, and with a particular fascination for empty, often desolate places that have a story to tell. I try to seek out the sometimes elusive emotion in simple landscapes where something significant has once happened. In the late 1970s and early 80s I recorded the last of the often profoundly atmospheric Georgian and Victorian warehouses and enclosed docks along the Thames before they were for the most part tragically demolished under the auspices of the London Docklands Development Corporation. I have spent much time in recent years working on a personal project to record the haunted nature of the remarkably sparse residual remnants of the many wartime airfields in Essex, East Anglia, and the flatlands of the shires, 'bomber country', beyond. I have now begun to realise a long-held ambition to marry the many vivid first-hand accounts of the Battle of The Somme with the long peaceful landscapes in which the tumultuous events to which they refer took place.
For the photographs on this site I work only in black & white, which I feel has the ability to convey to the viewer a strong sense of atmosphere and emotion in a way that colour can achieve only in the most skilled hands. Modern digital cameras and the software available to manipulate the photographs taken with them allow much licence to the photographer, but I am more interesting in using that technology to try to achieve some of the tonal and textural richness of traditional silver film, still the supreme medium for this kind of photography, but one for which the demands of my 'day job' allow me insufficient time.
Toby Webster, November 2013.
I studied art and photography as a student in the 1970s, but found a career in the wine trade, where I still work, running my own company, Black Dog Wines, which specialises in wines from high quality, artisan scale producers. With the aquisition of a digital SLR a few years ago I rediscovered my love for documentary landscape photography, and with a particular fascination for empty, often desolate places that have a story to tell. I try to seek out the sometimes elusive emotion in simple landscapes where something significant has once happened. In the late 1970s and early 80s I recorded the last of the often profoundly atmospheric Georgian and Victorian warehouses and enclosed docks along the Thames before they were for the most part tragically demolished under the auspices of the London Docklands Development Corporation. I have spent much time in recent years working on a personal project to record the haunted nature of the remarkably sparse residual remnants of the many wartime airfields in Essex, East Anglia, and the flatlands of the shires, 'bomber country', beyond. I have now begun to realise a long-held ambition to marry the many vivid first-hand accounts of the Battle of The Somme with the long peaceful landscapes in which the tumultuous events to which they refer took place.
For the photographs on this site I work only in black & white, which I feel has the ability to convey to the viewer a strong sense of atmosphere and emotion in a way that colour can achieve only in the most skilled hands. Modern digital cameras and the software available to manipulate the photographs taken with them allow much licence to the photographer, but I am more interesting in using that technology to try to achieve some of the tonal and textural richness of traditional silver film, still the supreme medium for this kind of photography, but one for which the demands of my 'day job' allow me insufficient time.
Toby Webster, November 2013.