Goldsmiths - University of London

Peter Coles

Peter Coles is a freelance photographer and journalist. While finishing a D.Phil on visual perception at Wolfson College, Oxford, Peter was also visiting tutor in Design Research at the Royal College of Art and was involved in pioneering efforts to bring the arts into public buildings, especially hospitals. He moved to Paris in 1986, where he lived for 20 years, writing for science magazines, including Nature, Science and New Scientist, before joining the editorial team of the UNESCO Courier and Sources magazines. During this time, Peter completed a major body of photographs called ‘Paris Traces’, looking at unconscious communication between people through the objects they abandon and marks they make in Paris streets and public places.

After travelling widely on assignments for many years, Peter moved back to London in 2006. Over the past ten years he has become increasingly interested in urban nature - the ‘urban biosphere’. Since joining CUCR as a research fellow in 2007, he has run a series of photography workshops on this theme, based on walks along Deptford Creek and the Greenway near Stratford. He is currently working on a collaborative photographic study of the Lea Valley and is developing a long-term study of urban trees started in Paris and now continuing in London. His work has been exhibited widely and is in a number of public and private collections.