(Over a period of almost seven years, Sykes traveled the c...)
Over a period of almost seven years, Sykes traveled the country photographing around 100 traditional British customs. Though inspired by the 19th-century photographer Benjamin Stone, Homer Sykes approached the events with a distinctly modern sensibility, creating dynamic images that focus mainly on the tradition that is being re-enacted against a background of everyday life.
https://www.amazon.com/Once-Year-Traditional-British-Customs/dp/1911306030/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=Homer+Sykes&qid=1605864384&sr=8-1
1977
https://www.amazon.com/ENGLISH-SEASON-Godfrey-Smith/dp/0881622362/ref=sr_1_6?dchild=1&keywords=Homer+Sykes&qid=1605864384&sr=8-6
1986
(Throughout Britain's length and breadth, ancient tribes, ...)
Throughout Britain's length and breadth, ancient tribes, druids, Celtic saints, medieval knights, and 18th-century landowners have bestowed upon future generations a wealth of astonishing sights, structures, and landmarks. These awesome sights appear in evocative color photographs, richly enhanced with the history, legends, and folktales that surround them.
https://www.amazon.com/Country-Mysterious-Britain-Homer-Sykes/dp/184188149X/ref=sr_1_8?dchild=1&keywords=Homer+Sykes&qid=1605864384&sr=8-8
1993
(Covering the late Neolithic period, and the Bronze, Iron,...)
Covering the late Neolithic period, and the Bronze, Iron, and Dark Ages, Sykes touches on several aspects of the Celtic landscape of ritual. The author's sphere of knowledge stretches as far as contemporary Celts, and the modern performance of Celtic ritual in its various religious and secular guises.
https://www.amazon.com/Celtic-Britain-Country-Homer-Sykes/dp/0297822101/ref=sr_1_7?dchild=1&keywords=Homer+Sykes&qid=1605864384&sr=8-7
1997
https://www.amazon.com/Road-Again-Homer-W-Sykes/dp/0954223306/ref=sr_1_10?dchild=1&keywords=Homer+Sykes&qid=1605864384&sr=8-10
2002
https://www.amazon.com/Shanghai-Odyssey-Homer-Sykes/dp/B000HWZ1WI/ref=sr_1_14?dchild=1&keywords=Homer+Sykes&qid=1605864384&sr=8-14
2002
https://www.amazon.com/Hunting-Hounds-Homer-Sykes/dp/0954223314/ref=sr_1_9?dchild=1&keywords=Homer+Sykes&qid=1605864384&sr=8-9
2004
(A decidedly edgy tenor permeated London's counterculture ...)
A decidedly edgy tenor permeated London's counterculture in the 1970s. Pitched against the backdrop of massive unemployment, racism, and IRA bombing campaigns, the city took on a bleak look that informed the aesthetics of Derek Jarman's first Super-8 films, Homer Sykes' photographs of the Grunwick strikes, the confrontational eroticism of Margaret Harrison's drawings and Peter Kennard's photomontages for Workers Press. These artists and others are examined in Goodbye to London, a collage of text and image that revisits the radical politics of that decade and the arts-informed by them.
https://www.amazon.com/Goodbye-London-Radical-Politics-Seventies/dp/3775727396/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&keywords=Homer+Sykes&qid=1605864384&sr=8-3
2010
https://www.amazon.com/My-British-Archive-Were-1968-1983/dp/1911306405/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=Homer+Sykes&qid=1605864384&sr=8-2
Homer Warwick Sykes was born on January 11, 1948, in Vancouver, Canada. His mother, Helen Grimmitt, was Canadian-born and raised in Hong Kong. The couple was married in August 1947, but in June 1948, in an early stage of his wife's pregnancy, Homer was killed in an accident at Lunghua airfield. Helen returned to her family home in Vancouver, and the son was born three weeks later. When the boy's mother remarried in 1954, the family moved to England.
Homer Sykes was a keen photographer as a teenager, with a darkroom both at home and at boarding school. In 1968 he started a three-year course at the London College of Printing (LCP) (now the London College of Communication) while sharing a house in St John's Wood.
In the summer vacation during his first year, Homer Sykes went to New York and was impressed by the work of current photographers - Cartier-Bresson, Davidson, Friedlander, Frank, Uzzle, and Winogrand - that he saw at the Museum of Modern Art.
Homer Sykes became seriously interested in photography in 1967 and was a freelance magazine photographer in 1980.
Sykes also photographed the British landscape for various books published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, but found time for his own projects: Hunting with Hounds, "a closely observed documentation of another set of rituals that define a dimension of the English way of life", and On the Road Again, photographs of four North American road trips taken over three decades.
When the Grimstone Foundation invited Homer Sykes to photograph Shanghai, the city of his conception, he jumped at the opportunity. A high point for the photographer was his discovery that the building on Jiang Xi Lu where his parents lived still existed, as the Fu Zhou building. Sykes's collection was exhibited and published as Shanghai Odyssey.
Homer Sykes has taught in the master's course in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at the London College of Communication.
In 2014, Maison de la photographie Robert Doisneau (Gentilly, Paris) holds a major exhibition of Sykes' work from the 1970s.
(Throughout Britain's length and breadth, ancient tribes, ...)
1993(Covering the late Neolithic period, and the Bronze, Iron,...)
1997(Over a period of almost seven years, Sykes traveled the c...)
1977(A decidedly edgy tenor permeated London's counterculture ...)
2010Quotations: "My pictures are about people, what they wear, how they look, how they interact with each other, against a background that sets the scene. They are not about me."
Sykes belongs to the National Union of Journalists in London, England. He won Arts Council of Great Britain grants in 1976 and 1974.
Quotes from others about the person
Michaël Houlette of Maison de la photographie Robert Doisneau writes: "The combination of several people in the same frame characterizes most of the photographs by Homer Sykes selected for an exhibition of his work of the 1970s. Often the structure of his images rests on two or three main figures who stand out and reveal themselves by an expression or attitude. There is no overly obvious direction or composition, just a keen observation and a systematic method of shooting: a short focal length, some preliminary observation and a certain English manner, frank and courteous, to come in contact with people that he sometimes photographs at very close range (surprisingly, they also seem to ignore the photographer who is at work)."
Annie-Laure Wanaverbecq of Maison de la photographie Robert Doisneau writes that "Observing his countrymen with humor and curiosity, over several years [Sykes] produced a fabulous visual archive of a nation in crisis and beset by doubt."
Homer Warwick Sykes was killed in an accident at Lunghua airfield.
Helen Grimmitt was Canadian-born and raised in Hong Kong.
Homer Sykes studied at London College of Printing and Graphic Arts in the late 1960s with Bill Jay and David Hum.
After absorbing advice from David Hurn, then a part-time lecturer at LCP who was living nearby, as well as other photographers that he met through Hurn, Homer Sykes moved on to photographing news stories for the Weekend Telegraph, Observer, Sunday Times, Newsweek, Now, Time, and New Society.
