Biography

After graduation, I was short-listed at the Royal College of Art to do industrial design and was offered a foundation art course at Leeds School of Art. But instead I made a complete break with engineering and design and joined the Beeb to become a film editor which I saw as an extension of my interest in the photographic image. I worked on music and arts programmes.

For several years as a television film and studio director and producer, I made educational programmes, mainly and ironically about technology. Later I trained educational television producers from overseas, notably Thailand and China. I ran courses for them in the UK and more interestingly on their home territory. Then I took up management and ended my thirty-odd year BBC career with six years as Head of the Open University Production Centre.

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	Who is Colin Robinson? Won the junior art prize at school! Took up photography and was President of Photographic Society while at University College London reading for a BSc in mechanical engineering but I never joined either profession. Exhibited People and Faces with Ronnie Hooberman and Mary Procter, now my wife. We three published a conversation with Morris Newcombe on photographic ethics. Described as a polymath by the BBC's Controller of Education, I have been comfortable with a mix of the arts and technology, the one feeding on the other.
After graduation, I was short-listed at the Royal College of Art to do industrial design and was offered a foundation art course at Leeds School of Art. But instead I made a complete break with engineering and design and joined the Beeb to become a film editor which I saw as an extension of my interest in the photographic image. I worked on music and arts programmes. For several years as a television film and studio director and producer, I made educational programmes, mainly and ironically about technology. Later I trained educational television producers from overseas, notably Thailand and China. I ran courses for them in the UK and more interestingly on their home territory. Then I took up management and ended my thirty-odd year BBC career with six years as Head of the Open University Production Centre.
	As a sideline, Mary and I had a small photographic studio in '60s London, using a Rollei to shoot wannabe models, portraits and minor commercial jobs. We still had a traditional wet process darkroom in the '70s and both discovered computers in the late '80s – Mary for print production, me for television management and through that for photography.
In the 1950s, I learned photographic basics from commercial photographers Brian Jones and Tahir Khan. Then in the sixties, my ideas were pulled in different directions by Cartier Bresson, the Bailey/Donovan syndrome and by painters Allen Jones and Richard Hamilton (soon to become a pioneer in image processing). Later I came to admire the work of Guy Bourdin, Helmut Newton and Bob Carlos Clarke. David Hockney's tv film and book Secret Knowledge opened my eyes further.	Brian Jones at Farringdon Studios, Smithfield, London c1950
	Some of my work was published in Photography magazine in The Likely Lads series (January 1967), billed as a "series on the work of young, up-and-coming photographers, rising stars in the profession who, in our opinion, are most likely to succeed".
Meanwhile I took wedding photos and lots of Mary ...
	Pixel technology suits my way of thinking and creating. Combined with my conventional photographic experience, it allows me to exercise my imagination and manipulate the result. Now I mostly use a Nikon digital camera, an Apple Mac Pro computer, an Epson Pro scanner and printer. Adobe Photoshop software is powerful enough to keep me exploring and developing for years.
As an artist photographer, I am starting to tackle some of the mixed media 'pop art' ideas that I had thirty years ago. An attempt at explaining where I am now can be found in my artist's statement.
	"There's a guy in the book who's not a fetishist but a photographer who uses fetish shoes in his work in a pop art way called Colin Robinson and he was absolutely lovely – just gorgeous." Caroline Cox interviewed in Forum magazine far right: With Professor Caroline Cox, fashion historian from the University of the Arts in London, at the launch of her book Stiletto which contains a couple of my images. Photo Ken Cox. In her book, Caroline generously described me as a pop artist. However much I refer to that style, I was not one of that 60s élite; I was not even active as an artist then. I do not presume to compare myself with those guys. OK – I'm post-pop! near right: An interview by Janice Birks for Frm magazine July 2005
Even now as I manipulate an image or make a digital print, I still think "will Brian Jones approve?" To see what I do now, please look at my gallery.
	artist's statement email me or telephone +44 (0) 1869 338 272 Back to the top of this page Back to the Home page copyright © Colin Robinson 2011