FRED SHIVELY

Born several decades ago in Easton, Pennsylvania USA, Fred's trajectory has taken him through university, the military, the advertising and corporate communications industries and several countries. Working as a creative director with some great talents in tv, film, music and photography both honed his skills and whetted his appetite particularly for the visual arts. His work ranges from stark, geometric architectural studies to lush florals. From surrealist and abstract experimentation to candid street images. Fred is now a member of the Artists Network Alpujarra as well as the Al-AndaLUZ Photographers Collective and has exhibited in numerous shows in southern Spain. Lives in southern Spain with writer/partner Arpi Armenakian Shively. Fred's work can be seen and purchased via: https://www.flickr.com/photos/fredshively/

TREVOR THOMPSON

Trevor was born and raised in London, England. He studied Fine Art as part of an education degree, graduating from Oxford in 1978. He got his first camera (a cheap, plastic polaroid) when he was fourteen and was immediately smitten. He started developing and printing his own work soon after, working mostly in black and white. He never made a career out of photography. With a family to provide for, he says his elbows were not big enough to make enough money from photography. Instead he spent various amounts of time as a jeweller, carpenter and festival site manager, finally working for 15 years as a graphic designer, designing editorial content for magazines based in the Southwest of England. His photographic skills were recognised by his employer, resulting in extra duties as picture editor and in-house photographer. His passion for photography has remained throughout, always with a preference for capturing people, gaining experience by documenting and donating his work to various local community projects, which he still does today. Trevor has traveled extensively in India and more recently in Southeast Asia. It was in India that he accelerated the development of his documentary style. He says: ‘Photographing people engaged in activities requires keen, rapid observation to capture the right moment.’ His work reveals an empathy with his subjects, which, he says, depends upon establishing a good rapport. Trevor sells his editorial-style work through the Alamy stock agency and exhibits albums on the Flickr website, which can be seen here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/trevthompson/sets/

NIKKI GIBBS

The magic of the camera and the power of the photographic image has fired Nikki's imagination since childhood. She began working as a photographers’ assistant in the ‘80s and launched out as a freelance photographer 5 years later. She then took on many varied commissions for design groups, advertising agencies and publishers specialising in photographing for charity campaigns, which included Shelter, NSPCC, Sense and Macmillan. In 2011 Nikki graduated with a first class honours degree in Photography at the University of Westminster, during which time she completed a body of work of landscape images to describe vulnerability, uncertainty and isolation.

‘Out of Darkness’ (seen below) consists of two triptychs depicting an internal landscape mirrored by the awesome power of nature. I wanted to convey the heightened sensual awareness experienced by photographing the sea at night. This is a timeless place of escape where the imagination can run wild and where we are vulnerable to anything happening. I am strongly influenced by the Romantic tradition and concepts of the Sublime, powerfully depicted in the paintings of Casper David Friedrich, J.M.W. Turner and Mark Rothko. In this work, the sea acts as a metaphor for the emotions endured when overwhelmed by feelings of anxiety and panic. The strong sense of foreboding, building into a sense of disorientation, lack of control and loss of self are expressed through the untamable power of the sea.

Nikki, originally from London, now lives with her partner and assorted animals in deepest Andalusia. See more of Nikki's work at: https://nikkigibbs.carbonmade.com/about

JAMES FOX

James Fox is from Surrey England of Irish and Scottish decent, now living in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, La Alpujarra. James enjoys Street Photography, interpreting straightforward everyday life in an interesting way, high contrast imagery and the play between dark and light. His interest in photography began when he was very young and his first photos were taken with an SLR film camera, given to him by a family friend. When he’s not casting an artistic eye through the lens of his camera, he’s tinkling the keys of various keyboards, including an electric piano, or writing music using Ableton software and a selection of other instruments, the latest of which is the electric guitar. By day James works as a software developer, by night a musician, singer and composer.

LOUIS MACLEAN

Scottish photographer Louis MacLean (b. 1984) has a keen eye for detail, taking away the formal function of landscapes and reinjecting a sense of dynamism through a considered perspective. Having moved from Edinburgh to Spain, MacLean harbours a grid-like understanding of his new surroundings, where tennis courts, stairwells and garden benches attribute to a wider visual encyclopaedia. Sun-drenched courts match with pastel columns, whilst bold shadows cut through structures and provide a distance between viewer and location. The straight lines further perpetuate the idea of the photograph as a fixed object, one which is controlled by the individual vision of the artist. The graphic style almost alludes to the constructivist movement, in which all art is seen to be autonomous, translating vistas into a fixed experimentation of striking colour, concrete frameworks and multidimensional layers. Follow Louis on Instagram: @louis.maclean