I take photographs every day. I also paint, sing and dance. I like to walk around without an agenda and catch whatever piques my eye.

I’ve always been into art but additionally have loved fashion, popular culture, languages, music and dancing since I was a child. I was born in London into a Persian Jewish family. My mother was an Israeli ballet dancer, from whom I inherited a love of dance and music. I even imagined becoming a fashion designer and spent my free time drawing and designing clothes. I’ve used a camera most of my life; my father had bought me a Kodak Brownie 127 when I was kid. At home we placed a lot of value on family photographs and home movies. As a teenager loved going to art galleries on my own; it felt like an adventure and an entry into a fascinating world and an escape from suburbia which I considered frustrating and boring.

I studied art history with Italian and French languages at Sussex University. It was during my year abroad in Venice that I started developing my own photos in a darkroom. My camera at that time was an Olympus OM1. I was also painting on canvas, mainly abstract expressionist still life and self portraits, but increasingly felt that the future for me was in photography and not fine art painting. On my return to England I also worked as an artist’s model which gave me an understanding of what it’s like to be on the other side of the artist’s eye or lens. In the late 80s I did a degree in Photography and Visual Culture at the University of Westminster, studying Semiotics and the writings of Saussure, Roland Barthes, John Berger and Susan Sontag as well as the work of photographers such as Jo Spence whose project Beyond the Family Album really resonated with me. I later went on to teach interdisciplinary courses in Art History, European Studies, Visual Culture and Film studies for many years which also involved curating film programmes for an independent cinema, before deciding to focus on my own creativity and Blog.

Now, in my mid 60s, I feel blessed to be able to live a creative life.