Homer Sykes who's work was featured in Tate Britain's 'How We Are', the gallery's first major photography exhibition. Photo and text : Graham Harrison
Homer Sykes
Nearly four decades after seeing photographic prints hanging on the walls of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, British documentary photographer Homer Sykes welcomes the acceptance of photography by Britain’s art establishment.
The 2007 Tate Britain show ‘How We Are : Photographing Britain’ was the first major exhibition of photography at the premier gallery for British art.
An examination of the British identity through the eyes of the nation’s documentary photographers ‘How We Are’ featured the work of Martin Parr and Daniel Meadows. It also featured the work of Homer Sykes who was inspired to begin a life as a documentary photography during a visit to another great gallery, nearly 40 years earlier.
FINDING A STYLE
Since that moment of inspiration Sykes’ career has followed a long path that began with self-financed long term documentary projects and also included editorial and commercial commissions, agency work and teaching before returning to the commitment of more personally inspired documentary projects.
The two most recent of these Hunting with Hounds and On the Road Again have been published by Mansion Editions, his self publishing concern created in 2002.
Homer Sykes was born in 1949 in Vancouver, Canada to American and Canadian parents. His father, killed in China before Homer was born, was a keen amateur photographer as too, it transpired, was Homer’s new step father.
He moved to England with his mother when she remarried in 1954 and by the age of 16 Sykes had built his own darkroom under the the eves of the art department at his boarding school. He also had a darkroom at home for use during the holidays (if the chemistry will not be missed the wonder of your own images emerging in the gloomy red glow of a safe-light had an intimate alchemy now lost to the electronic chip and computer screen).
The young Homer became an avid reader of Camera Owner (later Creative Camera) and the new newspaper colour supplements. He became interested in creative magazine photography, and in images with a personality that could be attributed to a particular creator rather than to just any photographer. He became especially interested in photographs that were good enough to explain themselves and needed no text.
In 1968 Sykes enrolled for a three year photography course at the London College of Printing (LCP – now LCC) and on his first summer vacation travelled to America where in New York he visited the Museum of Modern Art. There, hanging on the same walls as canvases by the greats of modern painting he found prints from the acknowledged masters of documentary photography. Sykes realised that photography was already seen as art in the United States.
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