Simon Murison-Bowie is interested in the role of photographs as explorations and documentations of what happens around him. In his student years it helped him search for his identity and has always contributed to his sense of self. For most of his professional life he was a publisher but maintained his interest in photography. In recent years he has developed a body of work that has been exhibited and published.

Most notably he has specialised in photographing artists at work in their studios, becoming fascinated by the task of capturing images of the artist absorbed in the act of creation and the atmosphere and detail of the studio space. This work was published as Artists & Studios: Private Views (Oxfordfolio 2012) and has been widely exhibited in Perm, Russia, as part of the Perm City Council’s 2013 Twin Cities Festival, and elsewhere in the UK.

He regularly exhibits in solo and group shows. He has published two other books of his photographs, and is currently working on projects encompassing landscape, architecture and still life. He works only in black and white film-based photography.

In his work with Barbara Gorayska this interest extended into documenting the

processes of painting and the nature of paintings as objects, not just images

Simon describes himself as a taker of photographs, not a maker; he documents what he finds. He has been strongly influenced by the ‘straight’ photography of the Neue Sachlichkeit of the late 1920s and by the resurgence of this approach as practised by the photographers of the Düsseldorf School (form the mid-1970s to the present day). He seeks a truly photographic response to the world around him and works solely with medium format black-and-white film.

From early stages, Simone documented the process of Barbara painting the Theatre of E-Morals triptych and details of the project. This work was first exhibited at the Science Museum, London, in June 2014. He continued his documentation at AOIA in Poland to provide a set of images for any subsequent exhibitions.