Welcome to the site of Robin Stemp

About Robin...
As a photographer, living in Cambridge, I am surrounded by architecture - not all of it good. In the 1930's, the painter John Piper warned that neither Oxford nor Cambridge, were good for artists. This still holds true, but both cities are remarkably photogenic. This can make for the obvious and the stereotypical, and I have certainly taken my share of bicycles flashing past Kings College Chapel, but over the years, a major inspiration for me, has been the facade of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. It has become a muse, which I photograph almost every day. The light changes minute by minute in the early morning and in summer I often cycle down to take a look at it before breakfast. My excuse - if one is needed - is that the pictures sell well and can be exhibited. But even if I did nothing with them, I would still want to record the way the light changes colour on the stone pillars, the shadows moving across the back wall. The building faces East and so it has to be caught in the early morning.

When the light is flat and blankly white, the stone has an ethereal opacity and in October, when the low sun is still quite strong, it becomes a shining orange object, spinning in light, the shadows deep purple or indigo. However, over the last few years, the light has changed, from a soft East Anglian wash to something harsher, sharper, yet flatter and more aggressive. Is this significant? Has the light changed so much? Certainly the weather appears to have become more erratic, and this must, surely, affect the light?

Originally a painter, I was seduced into photography sometime in the mid 1990's. However, I still think in that way and so my photographs are intentionally quite painterly. This has become quite marked in the recent images of interiors. In 2007, the American poets, Debora Greger and William Logan, found a dolls' house in a skip and immediately thought of me. Since then, the miniature interiors, photographed as if they were life size, have become as important a subject as the Fitzwilliam. The house, being portable, can be taken to the coast, or into the country, with the views seen through the windows. The rooms are seen not as toys - this doesn't interest me - but as spaces, which by being left either bare, or with the minimum of artefacts, can suggest a mood - which mood is up to the viewer.

Robin Stemp, 2008