My first real trip was hitch-hiking from Toronto to Vancouver in the summer of 1972. I set off with $40 in my pocket, got distracted in Winnipeg and followed an American girl home to Iowa. Her father pulled a gun on me in the middle of a cornfield and I headed back east ignominiously. Got a lift on the back of a Harley through Chicago and ended up sleeping rough under a bridge in Detroit. Walked to Windsor the next morning and spent my last fifty cents on a tin of tuna fish. I was 16 years old. Photography came later, as a way to see the world with a better budget.

I studied photography at Ryerson University in Toronto and later worked as an editor for Tony Stone Associates in London. I have worked freelance since the mid-80s for a wide range of editorial, corporate and advertising clients. My remit as a travel photographer is to record ordinary life in a way that is visually compelling; the raw materials are light, colour, graphic impact and a sympathetic rendering of humanity itself. I tend towards uncluttered, unambiguous compositions and believe that a picture should speak for itself; the less captioning and explanation required, the better...

I have a degree in Politics, speak French and Italian and have published several works of children's fiction.

The Drunken Boat is the name of a poem by the 17-year-old Arthur Rimbaud. In 1871 he had scarcely ventured out of provincial France. Much less than a 1000 words, it is worth more pictures than anyone could count.