Homer Sykes

FESTIVAL SPEAKER

Homer Sykes is a professional magazine and documentary photographer. His principal commissions in Britain during the 1970's - 1980's, were for what used to be called the "weekend colour supplements" such as The Telegraph, The Sunday Times, The Observer, You and the Sunday Express magazines.

He covered weekly news for Newsweek, Time, and the former Now! Magazine; covering conflicts in Israel, Lebanon, and Northern Ireland, as well as weekly news in the UK. Over the last fifty years he has shot numerous magazine portraits of the famous and not so famous - at home, at work and at play. Having always worked on personal photographic documentary projects along side commercial magazine assignments. 

In the 1970's, Homer started on what has become an on going career project documenting traditional British folklore customs and annual events.  In 1977 his first book was published ‘Once a Year, Some Traditional British Customs’ (Gordon Fraser). In 2016 Dewi Lewis Publishing re-published this volume with over 50 'new' images from his archive. 

Homer is the author, and co-author-photographer of nine books about Britain as well as Shanghai Odyssey (Dewi Lewis Publishing) and On the Road Again (Mansion Editions). The latter, an American project, was started in 1969, while he was at college. The photographic road trip was repeated in 1971, the work was then put away for thirty years, and in 1999 and 2001 he travelled once again by Greyhound bus criss-crossing America documenting the ‘down home’ idiosyncrasy of everyday middle America.

In 2002 he set up a one-man band self-publishing concern Mansion Editions. To date Mansion Editions has published On the Road Again and Hunting with Hounds. More recently Cafe Royal Books have published 30 zines of Homer’s work.

As an award-winning photographer he has never been busier, managing an extensive archive of over twenty thousand content rich images, working on personal projects, and shooting new material.

Many private collectors and national collections of his work. Homer spent ten years visiting Lecturers at the London College of Communication (University of the Arts London) taking group and one-to-one tutorials with both MA and BA students studying Photojournalism and Documentary photography.

Homer’s new book An Annual Affair is the conclusion of a career long photographic documentation of traditional annual country customs and small town traditions. It follows on from Sykes’ highly successful book Once A Year, first published in 1977 and most recently republished in 2016 by Dewi Lewis Publishing. In this new book there are over 140 photographs from nearly 80 different events, all but three not previously photographed by Sykes. At the back of the book there is a fascinating section dedicated to fuller captions and explanations regarding the history and origin of each event.