Tom Oldham is primarily a portrait photographer, shooting famous and talented people such as well known musicians and sports stars, both for publications such as Mojo magazine and for big-brand commercial clients.
In 2016, on the Summer solstice, Tom stayed up for 40 hours and shot a portrait per hour from midnight to midnight, for a project called The Longest Day. The whole process was captured in this great little short film and Tom then printed and distrubuted a free newspaper of the images.
His personal project, The Last of The Crooners, a portrait of the Palm Tree pub in Bow, east London and the aging musicians who perform there, was awarded the 2018 Sony World Photography Award for Portraits in the Professional Category.
His most recent project, Shoot An Arrow and Go Real High, focusses on some of the characters in the ballroom scene. One of the portraits from that project was recently featured in the Royal Photographic Society’s International Photography Exhibition.
On episode 125, Tom discusses, among other things:
- Doing big jobs
- The ‘rennaissance’ of film
- How he got into photography
- Avoiding a signature style
- His new project Shoot An Arrow and Go Real High
- Self-doubt
- The Last of The Crooners
- How winning a Sony Award with it had an impact and why he nearly didn’t enter
- Competitions
- His photobooks for schools initiative, Creative Corners
- The Longest Day project
“it comes to a larger point I suppose about really believing in your own work and that none of it actually reallly matters that much. And who really cares? Everyone is so - rightly or wrongly - self-absorbed, what does it matter if I’m having a wobble and doubt about what I feel about something? Really what does it matter? So surely it’s more avantageous to get the fuck on with it!”