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'Every relation with being is simultaneously a taking and a being taken, the hold is held' Maurice Merleau-Ponty

'The painter constructs, the photographer discloses'

Susan Sontag

ABOUT

Born and raised in Stockton on Tees, County Durham, Derek studied architecture at Kingston College of Art and University College London. Active in the student movement and the family squatting and co-operative housing movements in the 1970s, he became a registered architect and member of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1982 and completed an MSc in the History of Modern Architecture in 1985.

Derek has worked in social architecture and housing with different communities across London on housing and public realm projects in inner-city neighbourhoods, developing award-winning community housing and health initiatives and bridging different disciplines working with local authorities, housing associations, NGOs, and tenant and residents' groups . Appointed as a CABE Space enabler, he contributed to sector-wide design working groups, competition panels, and publications, featuring in the 2003 RIBA Journal edition ‘the people who really make architecture happen’.

Derek trained in person-centred counselling at the Institute of Education and in existential-phenomenological psychotherapy at the Philadelphia Association and Regent’s College. He accredited with the UK Council for Psychotherapy in 2012 and, in addition to working in private practice, has worked in a number of NHS funded psychotherapy and community counselling settings, including with local Mind services in the London boroughs. He has published essays on psychotherapy, phenomenology and the arts in the journals Existential Analysis, Hermeneutic Circular, and online Interalia Magazine.

Derek has taken (and been taken by) photographs since being a youngster when given his first camera, a Brownie 127.

PROJECTS

World Barber Shops: A series of photographs entered for the Oxford Photo 2023 Open Call: An Archive of Every Day Life. Barber shops are both personal and cultural spaces. Essentially local, reflecting their communities, yet found everywhere with much in common the world over. Changing over time but remaining as places of ritual, humour, argument, refuge, and therapy. An every day architecture offering also a space for theatre and performance.

'Flesh and the Angels', Hermeneutic Circular & Interalia Magazine, October/November 2020. A short meditation on creativity in life and art, its expression as a phenomenology of bursting, and the challenge of keeping going, with John Coltrane, Rainer Maria Rilke and Maurice Merleau-Ponty as companions.

'The Unsettled Sense', Interalia Magazine, September 2022. The eye is a sense organ and an affective organ. It receives and is moved. We see and we cry. This essay focuses on the eye which sees and, in particular, on seeing as a presence to our experience of the world and others. It considers how there is an inherent unsettledness and instability in the phenomenology of seeing. It explores how the phenomenal richness of seeing is, by its nature, in flux and susceptible to disequilibrium; how seeing is therefore also a steadying and bound up with our experience of spatiality and openness.