Timbo had an academic’s interest in critical theory and writing.
In the late 1980s he successfully undertook an MA in English Literature. We plan in due course to include some samples of his critical and academic writing, including his Masters thesis on Julia Margaret Cameron.
It seems that Timbo may have been influenced in more ways than one by Cameron, who is reported to have said:
“I turned my coal-house into my dark room, and a glazed fowl house I had given my children became my glass house…. I did not know where to place my dark box, how to focus my sitter, and my first picture I effaced to my consternation by rubbing my hand over the filmy side of the glass.
At around the period of his Masters, Timbo converted his own one-room flat in Sheffield into a permanent dark room, with black plastic stuck 24 hours a day over the windows, and painstakingly taught himself, by trial and frequent error, the complex techniques of Cibachrome processing, of ‘slide sandwich’-making and of photographic colour printing. The results of this work- still to be uploaded – serve to tie together Timbo’s connecting interests in critical theory, photography and poetry, in a way that somehow mirrors those of Julia Margaret Cameron.
We will add further materials to this section of the site, as these become available.