DANCER'S EYE

Step into a fantasy land and discover how Tyrone Singleton finds his inspiration

- Lauren Scott

How did you get into photography?

My first actual camera, now I remember, was a pointand-shoot when I was aged around 10 or 11 – it must have been quite a good one. I used to skateboard and I was always taking pictures of me and my friends skateboarding, then getting my parents to print them out. I was quite into my photography back then, but from there on, there was a pretty big gap until I took it up again in my early 20s.

In 2008, I had a fairly big injury and had to have knee surgery. Just before that, my dad had given me one of his old cameras, the Canon EOS 350D. I bought a massive zoom lens to go with it and that was the first time I’d used a digital SLR. We went on tour to Japan, so I took the camera and that was my reintroduction to photography. I fell in love with it all over again.

I’ve always been an artsy person. My dad is very much a hobbyist photographer, he has been his whole life. He used to work with medium format and slides and had a darkroom in our attic – I would often creep up there to watch him processing images. On my mother’s side of the family, all of them are painters, so artwork has literally always been covered throughout my house.

At school, I was really into drawing and art, however, I was a bit of a perfectionist and so I would always be frustrated that my pictures weren’t proportionately correct. I guess that there was a natural transition to photography.

Has your style changed since those skateboarding images? How would you describe your work to someone who hasn’t seen it before?