Homer Sykes

Homer Warwick Sykes (born January 1949) is a Canadian-born British documentary photographer whose career has included personal projects and landscape photography.

Sykes's father, also named Homer Warwick Sykes, was a Canadian-born American of English extraction who worked for the China National Aviation Corporation in Shanghai; his mother, Helen Grimmitt, was born in Hong Kong but her family emigrated to Canada in the early 1930s. The couple were married in Shanghai in August 1947; but in June 1948, at an early stage of his wife's pregnancy, Homer was killed in an accident at Lunghua airfield. In September 1948, Helen returned from Shanghai to her family home in Vancouver, where her son was born in January 1949.

Helen and her infant son Homer travelled to Liverpool on the SS Empress of Canada, arriving in September 1950. She remarried shortly thereafter. The family settled in Birmingham; like his father, Homer's step-father was a keen photographer. Homer too was a keen photographer as a teenager, creating a darkroom at Sidcot, his boarding school, that he would take home during vacations.

In 1968 Sykes started a three-year course at the London College of Printing (LCP), while sharing a house in St John's Wood. In the summer vacation during his first year, he went to New York, and was impressed by the work of current photographers – Cartier-Bresson, Davidson, Friedlander, Frank, Uzzle and Winogrand – that he saw at the Museum of Modern Art.

While wondering about a new photographic project, Sykes serendipitously came across a story on the Britannia Coconut Dancers in an issue of In Britain magazine. This led him to research other local festivals in Britain at the archives of Cecil Sharp House. Sykes' photography of these festivals was inspired by that of Benjamin Stone, but he approached them with a modern sensibility and a small-format camera, "[trying] to include the unintended participants and to document the unfolding drama in a contemporary urban environment". After viewing a touring exhibition of Stone and Sykes' photography of "festivals, customs and pageants", Colin MacInnes wrote that:

Although these photographs do great credit to Sykes both as a photographer and as a social investigator, it should not be thought that his interests lie exclusively in the direction of barrel parades, beating the bounds, or the Queensferry burryman (who saunters around the boozers looking like a floral dalek on appropriate occasions). For . . . [Sykes'] chief interest is in a more varied photography. . . . At [giving us a heightened image of reality], Homer Sykes is very good indeed. . . . [When photographing a pageant], he seems to have caught the performers rather off their guard – not so much when doing this traditional thing, as having done it, or being about to do it.

The photographs also appeared in Once a Year: Some Traditional British Customs, a book (published by Gordon Fraser, uniform with Patrick Ward's Wish You Were Here) in which Sykes presents one or more photographs of and a detailed explanatory text for each of 81 customs—for example, three photographs (on pp. 105–108) of the annual auction on the first Monday following St Peter's Day (29 June) at the Grapes Inn of the mowing and grazing rights to Yarnton Meadow (or Yarnton West Mead), Yarnton (Oxfordshire). Once a Year has been described as "a beautifully photographed, tender and often humorous document"; and, 32 years after its publication, as remaining "[p]robably the best study of English folklore and ritual".

But Sykes's interests went far beyond annual customs. Annie-Laure Wanaverbecq of Maison de la photographie Robert Doisneau writes that "Observing his countrymen with humour and curiosity, over several years [Sykes] produced a fabulous visual archive of a nation in crisis and beset by doubt." This included the glam rock, punk, new wave and other music/fashion scenes of Britain.