Photography - Leigh Simpson

I knew Leigh Simpson when we were teenagers. He used to take black and white pictures, and develop them in his own darkroom. He showed me some one time we met on the train back from Brighton about 20 years ago. They were documentary-style pictures of skinheads. They were brilliant. I was surprised that Leigh, a quiet kid, had managed to get close enough to his subject matter to take such revealing pictures. That took some balls, I realised. He also took some great ones of Bonfire Night in the eighties, which stuck in my mind: I called him and asked him if we could use them in the November edition of the Viva Lewes Handbook, and he agreed. They went down a storm.

Leigh, inevitably, went on to become a professional photographer, although for years, he has since told me, he stopped shooting black and white pictures on film. Quite recently he was encouraged to take up this form of photography again while shooting a series of pictures for a client in Milan. He also bought up a large stock of film when it looked like the camera-film company Ilford were going to go bust. He’s started up again, which is a good thing, because he’s very talented. This exhibition, in Susanne Wolf’s new space on Friar’s Walk, is a combination of his old stuff and a few recent shots. There’s a touch of Henri Cartier-Bresson or W Eugene Smith about his shots, a sense that he’s really adept at ‘capturing the moment’. AL