Simon Roberts
Simon Roberts
Art photographer
In a career spanning more than two decades, the British photographer Simon Roberts has produced a wide variety of work. Starting out in editorial photography, he shot around the world for publications including The Sunday Times Magazine and Esquire.
After helping start the Growbag photographers’ agency, Simon continued editorial work and moved on to shooting medium-format images, using a setup comprising one camera and one lens. In 2004, in a move to take back the authorship of his work, and to produce long-term projects that he could publish in his own photographic books, Simon embarked on a one-year journey across Russia. The result was Motherland (2005), fêted as one of the most comprehensive accounts of that country produced by a photographer based in the West.
Since then, Simon has turned his lens on Britain, for works including We English (2008), Pierdom and Merrie Albion (2017). He is currently shooting a work on ancient British woodlands, as a personal response to the ongoing Brexit process.
Despite producing a varied output of work, Simon Roberts is perhaps best-known for his photographs of English people in the English landscape. His interest in this subject is hardly surprising: he studied human geography at university, and his photographs invite the viewer to consider who is actually in the landscape. But for his latest work, he is photographing ancient British woodlands – without people in them.
