Niall McDiarmid

Niall McDiarmid is a photographer based in London. His work is primarily about documenting Britain and has been published and exhibited widely.

His first book Crossing Paths was published on 2013. He started this project on 2011, he took hundreds of train journeys, visited over 120 towns and photographed 800 people over 3 years. He was influent by Daniel Meadows who is an English photographer and had a similar project in 1970s.

This project managed to be both a personal project as well as a document of modern Britain.  Independent  on Sunday said. He struck up conversations with people he thought  interesting and enable him to capture something of their personality in portraits. At the same he documented the modern sociality.

Here are a few photographs from Crossing Paths. When looked through them, I found on each of the photographs, the subject- the portrait person and the background come together as a whole, either their the colours or patterns of their clothes match the background or the way they are wearing, standing or looking together with the background tells a story, reflects how a certain life style fits in the background society.

I first heard his name from Sam Cornwell's talk. When I looked through his work I wondered why these portraits can stand out from other street portraits photographs. I looked for more information this time and looked into details of the photographs. I do find they are great photographs, lots of thinking are in them. They are not telling you about a person, they are telling you about a society. When they come together, they tell about a modern Britain today.

Nail McDiarmid recently had an interview by an Italian magazine Fortographia about the Via Vauxhall book. He said a bus stop would give him the chance to photograph an interesting cross section of south Londoners travelling their daily journeys. The Vauxhall neighbourhood has a huge urban redevelopment going on but the same time it has a wonderful social and ethnic mix. So I can see he has his reason to choose a location with related to our unit Location Photography. He said he had no specific person in mind when he chose his subject, just something catches his eyes. I think this "something" is not randomly something, it comes from his understanding about the society, his photographic instinct, his understanding about the relationship between the subjects and the surroudning area.  I like his work.