Ben Harman, Director of Stills: Centre for Photography in Edinburgh, speaks to Paul Hill.

Paul Hill is a photographer, journalist, author and teacher who is widely regarded as a major influence on contemporary British photography, Born in 1941 in Ludlow, Shropshire, Hill worked as a newspaper reporter from the late 1950s until he became a freelance photographer in 1965. As a photojournalist he worked for the Birmingham Post & Mail, The Guardian, The Observer, The Telegraph Magazine, and the BBC, amongst others. He became a full-time lecturer in photography at Trent Polytechnic, Nottingham in 1974 where he was later appointed head of the Creative Photography course, the forerunner to all current student-centred higher education courses in the medium. Another notable achievement around this time was the establishment, with his wife, Angela, of The Photographers' Place, the UK's first residential photography workshop, at their Peak District home. Between 1995 and 2010, Hill was a professor at De Montfort University, Leicester, and set up the MA in Photography course in 1996, which was the first in Britain. A former member of the Arts Council’s first photography committee in the 1970s, he helped set up the Derby Festival of Photography in 1991 and was Director of East Midlands Arts for four years during the 1990s. Hill was made a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society in 1990 and, four years later, he was awarded an MBE for services to photography. Hill was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Art by Derby University in 2011 and De Montfort University in 2012.

Paul Hill has exhibited regularly since 1970 throughout the British Isles, Europe, North America, Japan and Australasia and is the author of Dialogue with Photography (co-authored with Thomas Joshua Cooper), 1979/2005; Approaching Photography, (1982/2004); White Peak Dark Peak, (1990) and Corridor of Uncertainty, (2010). His work is in the art collections of, amongst others, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, Bradford; Arts Council England; Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, Stockholm; Australian National Gallery, Canberra; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and Cleveland Museum of Art in the USA. Birmingham City Archives, which houses one of the UK's major collections of photographs, acquired the Paul Hill/ Photographers' Place Archive in 2004. An exhibition of Hill's work, Prenotations Remastered, will be held at Argentea Gallery, Birmingham, UK from 17 September to 29 October 2021. 

www.hillonphotography.co.uk

Recommendations during this episode included:

How Change Happens: Photography Education and Society by May McWilliams. Published by Blurb (2020)

Approaching Photography by Paul Hill. First published in 1982. Third edition published by Routledge (2020)

Photography books (in general) published by Routledge.