Simon Lewis is a photographer well recognised by designers for his portraits, landscapes, annual reports and editorial work. He likes to work with the latest equipment, Mac and software, also to go back to the roots of photography; he has run a specialist fine art darkroom, mixing his own chemicals, emulsions, creating papers and craft printing. Simon is known, by other professional photographers, as a photographic printmaker and teacher with a wealth of knowledge about darkroom and computer image-making techniques.
I designed typographic marks for Simon to identify his limited edition photographic prints, cards, posters, film and stationery. A crafted identity for a craftsman.
As well as his portraiture and corporate work Simon has a growing reputation for his ‘documentary’ style wedding photography. Recent commissions have taken him to the far corners of the British Isles and to some local but exclusive and unusual wedding locations eg. the Houses of Parliament. For his stand at the National Wedding Show, Olympia I produced publicity materials.
You’ll find Simon’s work elsewhere in my portfolio, but below is one of the first commissions where I collaborated with him. During a long, hot summer I worked as art director for a series of portraits of NVQ apprentices at work in their chosen occupations. Photos included a day nursery, a tomato farm hot house and a red-hot bottle production line. Our star for this photograph is Dev whose apprenticeship was at a huge oil refinery – fuels and hot gases run through a maze of pipes many miles long. To take this picture Simon and I stood on one tower, Charlie (Simon’s assistant) and Dev on the other. It was too noisy to shout or hear a mobile phone so we communicated with sign language, mostly. But in order to relay instructions poor Charlie also had to run up and down the two towers several times before we got the shot.
Stuart Russell 