Nick Wynne

Nick Wynne photographed Birkenhead in 1988 and 1989, while still in his teens and studying photography at Wallasey.

At Wallasey, Wynne was taught by Fred Edwards and Tom Wood. Before meeting Wood, he mainly photographed landscapes. He wanted to photograph people but was too shy to approach them.

Wood showed him work by Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand and Diane Arbus, and invited him along while he photographed on buses, in Liverpool markets and around New Brighton. “Tom taught me how to read photographs,” Wynne says. “He talked about the pictures and why they worked, and it changed the way I looked at things.”

Wynne soon began making work locally in Birkenhead, asking residents if he could photograph them or take pictures from their balconies. The camera gave him a reason to speak to people he would otherwise have struggled to approach.

These photographs were made alongside Wynne’s early work across Liverpool and Merseyside and his photographs of Traveller communities at Shotton in North Wales.