Weighing the Mayor, High Wycombe

Location

Country: UK
City: London
Place: Northern Ireland Office, 1 Horse Guards Road

Homer Warwick Sykes is a Canadian-born British photographer whose keen interest in photography as a teenager led him to create a darkroom at home. In 1968 he started a three-year course at the London College of Printing. During his first year, he travelled to New York, and was impressed by the work of photographers he saw at the Museum of Modern Art. ‘I hoped to – and thought I could – do what they were doing and set out to do it’ said Sykes, wanting to create a fusion between the American street photographer genre (of Lee Friedlander, Burk Uzzle and Garry Winogrand) and the humanitarian reportage and documentary photography of Cartier Bresson, Robert Frank and Bruce Davidson. In the 1980s Sykes moved on to photographing news stories for the Weekend Telegraph, Observer, Sunday Times, Newsweek, Now, Time, and New Society. He also worked on his own projects: Hunting with Hounds, ‘a closely observed documentation of another set of rituals that define a dimension of the English way of life’, and On the Road Again, photographs of four North American road trips taken over three decades. Sykes has taught on the master's course in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at the London College of Communication. Four of the most iconic images of British customs taken by Sykes in the 1970s were included in How We Are an exhibition at Tate Britain in 2007.

Places

England, Buckinghamshire

Subjects

smoking pipe, topography, genre, weighing scale, man, woman, 20th century costume, ceremonial costume, robe, legal costume, top hat, wig, Mayor, signage, archway, pillar (architectural feature)

Materials & Techniques

photograph (as object name), black & white photograph

Artist

Homer Sykes (1949 - )

Title

Weighing the Mayor, High Wycombe

Portfolio Title

Once a year: some traditional British customs

Date

published 1977

Medium

Black and white photograph

Acquisition

Purchased from the Arnolfini Gallery, January 1978

GAC number

13649