Bob Clayden
Community Artist and Photographer
I am mainly a Photographer working with lens and lensless images working to document and cooperate with other artists . As a community artist I use ceramics, racku, pinhole cameras, solagrams and cyanotypes to make public art enabling people to show there creativity. I exhibit my work and curate others in exhibitions in the UK and Europe. My work has been exhibited in many places from hair dressers salons to billboards via galleries and public buildings.
I started taking photos at 10 and by 14 was processing film and prints and have continued till the present. I worked with Joan Littlewood at theatre workshop in the east end of London where I learned , everyone an artist everyone a scientist, and have worked in this way ever since documenting everyday life and people.
As my children grew up I did less serious photography concentrating on parenthood. Working with community groups,poets and other artists. I started exhibiting in Essex then in Europe as well. In the late 1990’s I started to use digital cameras alongside analogue to make work with Photoshop, this along with 1hour processing, young people could be drawn into expressing themselves, the results being published and turned into public artworks. I started doing more lensless work, pinhole cameras from scrap, Cyanotype sun printing on paper and silk and colour photograms to make art glass windows. In the early 21st century I made my first giant pinhole camera, using a drying room on the 12 floor of a tower block. Influenced by Geoff Troll a leading French art therapist I learnt to use ceramics with groups firing ware in paper kilns and sawdust firings in the open air. In this digital age I have been making books and websites but my analogue work seems more important. Running the biggest permanent pinhole camera in the world(probably ), making solargrams, tracking the sun over 6 months
I would like to share my skills and knowledge of processing film and creating prints in the darkroom on analogue silver materials. To work with groups in Wakefield helping them to enjoy there own artisum and cultural life through whichever medium they want. To encourage individuals, groups and collectives to use the Giant Pinhole Camera in Friawood Valley Gardens have only lived in Pontefract for 15 years and I have been welcomed into the artistic life of the area with open arms. Wakefield district has so many talented and engaged artists of all kinds that it is a pleasure to live here. Pontefract, to find out more about the light and physics of photography and more importantly reimagine the posobilitys of the space for the 21st century.
I have a negative capturing the minuets silence for Lady Diana. Captured with a specially constructed pinhole camera designed to make the exposure last 60 seconds.
The opening of our exhibition in the hall of nations in the United Nations building in Geneva. The exhibition was requested by Kofi Annan when he was Secretary-General of the United Nations
To collaborate with Jason Perry and working with local communities discover the Yorkshire tea ceremony Then create the implements and crockery to perform it.


From the book Shops on the Edge, a documentary project showing the corner shops in Castleford and Agbrigg and the people who ran them.

A cyanotype on paper using found items from nature to create the image. Part of the exhibition "Cats" in Artmazia Normandy

Working inside the giant pinhole camera. Pairs of people made and then processed full length life sized portraits, each negative 2meters high. They had to stand still for the 12 minute exposure. Shown at Dean Clough photographic gallery.