Muse littleyouth

A muse, some odd lenses and the influence of Julia Margaret Cameron are what drive film photographer Colin Watkins, he tells Damien Demolder

- Damien Demolder

During this interview I discovered that Colin Watkins and I used to use the same enlarger. I don’t mean the same type of enlarger, but the actual same De Vere 504 cold cathode enlarger that was still in the same position in the darkroom at Southend College of Art and Design when I went there some years after he did. We were taught by the same tutors – some of whom are even still alive today – and spent quite a bit of time chatting about people we know in common. I won’t bore you with all that, but I might with our shared love of film photography, odd lenses and of Julia Margaret Cameron.

‘If I could paint I’d be a painter. But I can’t, so I use photography,’ Colin explains. ‘I’m not really a photography person in the sense I’m not interested in photographing windmills, birds or landscapes, I’m just a portrait photography person. My field is a bit narrow, and I’m slightly obsessed. I love looking at portraits too, and can spend hours trawling through websites of portraits, saving the ones I like so I can look at them again. I like to see what works, what doesn’t and what I can apply to my own work. We all like to pinch a bit here and there, cherry-pick ideas. I might be inspired by the way grain is shown in a picture, or the way dark hair stands out from a background, a pose or composition, and then I assemble all those elements into my own work.