Chris left England in 1987, aged 19, clutching a one-way ticket to Karachi. He has lived in Asia ever since. His love of photography began right at the start, hanging out with impoverished freelance photojournalists in war-torn Peshawar, where he was – fleetingly – Official Poet of The Frontier Post.
His 1988 odyssey aboard the Bugis perahu ‘Kurnia Ilahi’ – a month long sea voyage he documented on just two rolls of colour slide film, and which became the subject of his debut book ‘BUGIS NIGHTS’ – led to his first story and photos being published, and the beginning of his career in photography.
He joined Panos Pictures Photo Agency in 1992 with a selection of his photos from China’s Pearl River Delta, and has been covering Asia’s boom, bust and boom cycle ever since.
Photography assignments and wanderlust have taken Chris to over 70 countries, so far, and his work has appeared in all manner of publications, from Newsweek and Forbes to National Geographic Traveller and Discovery. He has photographed guidebooks from San Diego to Saigon and all points in between, held two solo photographic exhibitions, and regularly shoots for the NGOs Action Aid, Save the Children and OXFAM.
‘BUGIS NIGHTS’, published in August 2023 by Earnshaw Books, is the first volume of the series of auto-biographical travel memoirs The Diaries of a Western Nomad. The second volume – ‘SHOOT, ASK AND RUN!’ – is slated to be published at the end of 2024 by the same publisher.