John Darwell

John Darwell (born 1955) is a British photographer.
Life and career.
Darwell was born in Bolton, Lancashire, in 1955. He has a BA in photography from Manchester Polytechnic, and a PhD from the University of Sunderland. (His thesis was titled "A Black Dog Came Calling: A Visualisation of Depression through Contemporary Photography".) He is a Reader in photography at the University of Cumbria.
As a photographer, Darwell "roots himself in neglected landscapes". His early work, published in "Working Lives" and "The Big Ditch", was in black and white, but he moved to colour soon thereafter and has not used black and white since.
"Jimmy Jock, Albert and the Six Sided Clock" (published in 1993) shows the Liverpool docklands at a time when "the amount of cargo passing through the docks" was higher than ever before, but when, thanks to mechanization, everything was run by fewer than 600 men, down from over 20,000.
For three weeks in late 1999, Darwell photographed within the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone: Pripyat, numerous villages, a landfill site, and people continuing to live within the Zone. This resulted in an exhibition and book titled "Legacy".
The first pyre intended to check the British outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in early 2001 took place very close to Darwell's house in Cumbria. Darwell devoted a year to photographing this and its aftermath; the resulting book, "Dark Days", "catalogues the destruction that consumed local farming communities and shut Cumbria off from the outside world".
"DDSBs: Discarded Dog Sh*t Bags" shows "a typology of discarded plastic bags containing dog muck", photographs Darwell presents "as evidence of our half-hearted commitment to the ecological cause".