Colin O’Brien was born in 1940 in the then London Borough of Finsbury. His photographic journey began early in his childhood, when he took his first picture of two Italian friends in Clerkenwell, in 1948. Since then he has continued to record the ordinary and everyday events that surrounded him and has continued to do so to the present day. Most of his output has been taken in London, where he was born and has lived all his life but he made a number of photographic journeys to other parts of England over the decades, and had planned to produce much more work from around the country, in the North in particular… when he sady died sudenly on 19 August 2016. His obituary in The Guardian newspaper can be seen here.
Colin’s photographs were mainly about urban life, metropolitan and coastal, and could be classed as social documentary. He demonstrated his eye for irony, combined with a professional competence. He won numerous competitions and has had many exhibitions, resulting in rave reviews and critical articles recognising his increasing status as a major exponent of the peripatetic school. Colin produced pictures for a number of photography books with associated bodies of work, in which poetic beauty was never lost, no matter how commonplace his subjects might seem.
