StudioTalk / Alastair Batchelor / London, UK

“As for grain and texture, I personally really like it when an image looks as though it’s ‘built’ from something other than pixels. It reminds me of when you inspect an oil painting up close in a gallery and see the individual brush strokes.”

Dwayne Brown

Hi Alastair, your journey in photography has been unique—from capturing London’s hidden cityscapes to cinematic portraits and headshots. What inspired you to move from urban scenes to photographing people?

Alastair Batchelor

I decided to take up photography at 19 while looking through an issue of?Time Out?London. There was an article by a couple of ‘urban explorers,’ photographers who would sneak into abandoned buildings to capture strangely haunting and stunning images of forgotten places. As with any thrill-seeking, we soon wanted to push the boundaries further and ended up planning a series of trips into London’s abandoned tube stations. These stations are connected to the live underground system and required more extreme methods of access, like abseiling down ventilation shafts and running along live tracks. Eventually, our adventures caught up with us, and we ended up in court facing charges! Luckily, the case was hugely exaggerated, and our lawyers got it dropped before trial. This felt like a sign to move into a new genre of photography. After seeing the work of photographers like Alessio Albi and Kolja Eckert, I was immediately drawn to the filmic, dramatic style of capturing people.

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