My name is Patrick Sampson and I was raised in a quiet town in the East Midlands, but moved down to London two years ago to assist an editorial photographer full time. I now live in Hackney.
First of all, please introduce yourself!
My name is Patrick Sampson and I was raised in a quiet town in the East Midlands, but moved down to London two years ago to assist an editorial photographer full time. I now live in Hackney.
Tell us your story.
Originally, I was really mesmerised by my father’s SLRs as a child (a Canon AE-1 and AV-1). I loved them aesthetically and can remember as a little boy sitting on his shoulders while he took photographs of planes at our local Air Show.
I started to get really into photography after my friends asked me to photograph their band at a show when I was about 15. I started shooting them and then moved on to bigger bands as time passed. At about 18 years old, my father gave me those cameras and I started to use them all the time, shooting a little bit of everything to find my feet. I now shoot documentary and landscape projects.
What was the concept and inspiration behind the work, and how did the project come about?
My most recent project is a body of landscape photographs titled HVITUR. I have always enjoyed photographing landscapes, but had never taken them seriously until I graduated university in 2013. I flew to Iceland in 2015 in order to form a serious landscape project as I’d wanted to travel there for years and knew it would be a great place to shoot.
What inspires you?
Generally, books inspire me. I’m currently reading The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard. It’s strongly theoretical but discusses conceptual theories regarding space using beautiful metaphors, and I hope to use it as a reference for a future project. Otherwise just looking at other contemporary photographers’ work inspires me; I’m a huge fan of people like Lane Coder, Dan Mariner, Tom Illsley and Maria Lax.
What’s your next move?
I currently have a few pieces on the go. My first is another landscape project in which I’m photographing a housing estate that was linked with a huge police brutality case in the 1970s. It’s still considered to be a slightly unsafe area so shooting there can be difficult. I’m also currently writing my first photo essay on the recent passing of my mother, and putting some ideas together for a video piece to go along with that.
