During an interlude from film directing Paul Anthony turned to photography. His initial subject was the inspiration for his film: upstream Thames and its inhabitants. His camera-eye is highly selective. He takes few shots. Waiting patiently for the moment. His preferred camera is a classic 35mm Leica.

Paul Anthony is a Londoner by birth and a traveller by inclination. Dominant in the current collection is the return to his beloved Havana, Cuba. Whether here or elsewhere, he searches for that fleeting, essential moment of life as he finds it. The resulting images are contemplative and poetic and yet utterly authentic.

At school, Paul Anthony showed an early talent for drawing and painting. Way ahead of his peers, his teacher encouraged him to sit A-level art at 14. However, home life made it impossible to continue formal education and he left at 16. Along with painting and the visual arts, he soon embraced classic cinema of early Truffaut, Renoir and Vigo. A poetic realism that resonated with his own creative sensibility!

Writing film scripts while living on the Thames he determined to capture its life and contrasting landscape and seasons. An ambitious project began. The characters would improvise their own lives. Their story centered on a journey from mouth to source by a refugee, restless and searching for a personal Utopia. The project is still in progress.

David Somerset, fiba editor, 2008