Photographer
Geoff Duffield
A London-based photographer who explores the relationship between nature, cultural and personal memory, and identity.
Practice-led
Geoff's work is an interpretation of his surroundings, his emotional response to them. Experimenting with physical and digital intervention allows him to imbue his images with multiple layers of meaning and emotion. Recent projects include The Corpse Road and All At Sea which focus on mortality and Brexit respectively
CURRENT WORK
The British Rainforest
Geoff is currently working on a long-term project, focusing on the hidden British rainforest.
Addressing the most common response “I didn’t know we had a rainforest.” Geoff’s photography contemplates “how can we protect this precious environment if we don’t know that it exists?”
Although rare, there are a thousand or more fragments of the British rainforest hidden in isolated pockets, in valleys and cleaves, and even perched on our coast. They are immediately recognisable once you walk into them.... floors and boulders covered in rich green moss, reaching up and along the trunks of trees, with beautiful lichens and fungi in great abundance, a damp earthy scent, and in Springtime a cacophony of birdsong to add to the background noise of water and wind.
THE BRITISH RAINFOREST aims to inspire and add to the growing movement to reintroduce this globally rare and incredibly bio-diverse habitat back into our cultural memory through image-making and sound recording.
Projects
The Corpse Road
The Corpse Road is set on Dartmoor. The project was inspired by a personal crisis, and the need to make sense of it. The blank canvas (Geoff mistakenly thought) of Dartmoor felt like the vast space in which to work out his feelings.
The project subsequently took on a new form: the imagined last day on Earth of a medieval man as he contemplated his body being carried from the high moor, along one of Dartmoor's corpse roads, to his final burial place at Lydford Church.
In this sense, the project is also about Geoff’s own mortality, and the traces that humans leave on our landscape.
Projects
All At Sea
All At Sea was Geoff's Final Major Project for his Masters in Photography at Falmouth University, from where he graduated in July 2023.
The project was a personal response to Brexit and involved interviewing two hundred people who had voted to leave the EU. The interviews took place in pro-Leave constituencies around the coast of Brexit Britain.
Geoff interviewed these individuals in an attempt to understand how they now viewed Brexit, six years on from the Referendum. Sometimes photographing them, and more often than not making images of the sea and coast, this work was Geoff's personal response to what they were telling him.
The most common response from those that he interviewed was “I didn't know what I was voting for”.
About Geoff
Curious Activist & Feelings-Led Photographer
In 2023, Geoff graduated with a Master of Arts in Photography from Falmouth University, an award that marked his transition from a multi-award-winning book publisher* to full-time photographer.
Drawing on his forty-year career collaborating with authors** and following a BA in Linguistics & Politics from Birkbeck, University of London, his photo series are nuanced narratives, creating work that balances images with text.
As a partner and co-founder (with Sara Cinamon) of The Colour Green in 1987, and supported by Friends of the Earth, he photographed the tropical and temperate rainforests of India, recording how local people used the forest for their everyday needs, whilst trying to protect their forests from loggers. It was here that he encountered and supported The Chipko, the movement that saw people wrap their arms around trees to prevent their felling. Images from this project were used in one of the early Save Our Rainforests campaigns by F.O.E.
Throughout his publishing career, he continued to support and raise funds for environmental causes, but it was only more recently (2017 – current) that he became actively involved again, being a trustee and advisor to Essex Wildlife Trust.
Like many people, Geoff’s initial emotional engagement with nature was as a child, and those memories and feelings remain a clear influence for him as a photographer. Specifically, there was a football-pitch-sized wood within a short walk of the west London council estate where he grew-up. Between the ages of 6 and 12, he and his friends spent long days in that private world which offered freedom and escape.
*British Book Awards: 2011 Marketing Campaign of the Year, and 2015, 2017,2018 Publisher of the Year (Pan Macmillan, Creative Director).
**Authors that Geoff has worked with include Arundhati Roy, Elton John, V.S Naipaul, Roald Dahl, Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Jeffrey Archer, Meera Syal, Bruce Chatwin, Julia Donaldson, Peter James, and Laurie Lee.
Kazuo Ishiguro
“I started to see parallels between memory and dream, the way you manipulate both according to your emotional needs at the time. The language of dreams would also allow me to write a story that people would read as a metaphorical tale as opposed to a comment on a particular society.”
Project Updates
The British Rainforest Blog
This body of work incorporates multiple trips along the length of the western seaboard of the UK, across 2024 and 2025. Watch this space for updates, development, and travels for The British Rainforest project.
Details of a book and exhibition will also follow.
Research
In the early stages of my work, I am indebted to Guy Shrubsole (see below), Pete Burgess of The Devon Wildlife Trust, and the Devon-based naturalist John Walters for their support so far for The British Rainforest project .They have shared their knowledge with me, both personal and scientific, and I'm so grateful for this.
If you would like more detail on the locations visited so far, please feel free to email me.
Inspiration
In particular, Guy Shrubsole's award-winning book 'The Lost Rainforests of Britain', provided the spark that made me want to embark on this quest. Many other books and online articles, as well as my role as a trustee of Essex Wildlife Trust, added context for my research, but Guy's book was the single piece of work that created my momentum.
Learn More
OH HEY, FOR BEST VIEWING, YOU'LL NEED TO TURN YOUR PHONE