I often use myself as a test subject for photographs. It is simple and economical, all I need is a long cable release.

Working with some of the older techniques, there is often a long exposure time, smiling can be difficult.

This one is of me taken in 1978 for some publicity material, I used the self timer on the camera and tried to smile.

42 years later. A wet plate tintype with 10,000 joules of Strobe lighting. In total I have about 50,000 joules capacity of lighting made by “Strobe Equipment” in the 1950s and ’60s. This is wonderful quality lighting – massive capacitors give a strong slow blast of light which is beautiful for the older traditional photography.

This ‘nude in a niche’ photo was done for a magazine series in the 1980s . My brief from the editor was to do a few pages of nude photography. They assumed I would be using female nudes, but I presented a series of self portraits. I had also done some conventional stuff, but I though it was about time that “nude” photography did not only mean “glamour” work. As it happened they agreed with me and ran the self portrait series. I have recently reprinted this as a carbro print onto glass and made an orotone.

The “millstone” portrait is another in the self “nude” magazine series. When it was published it was also used as a publicity shot for the series, interestingly it was then captioned as a portrait of Frank Bruno done by Lord Snowdon – I was delighted and asked the magazine to pay me both the fee Snowdon would have got and the modelling fee that Bruno would have charged – they declined and just paid me fifty quid, but I did get a lot more work from them.

This self portrait was done for another magazine – it is the last self portrait I did for a long while. It is an allegory of my life at the time and has painful memories.