Quote: "The most important thing is: You don't give up. Believe in what you are doing. The moment you stop believing in a story you are doing then that story is over."

Simon Wheatley joined Magnum Photos as a Nominee in 2005.
British, b. Singapore, 1970

Though he was born in Singapore, Simon Wheatley spent his teenage and college years in the UK, and graduated from Manchester University in 1993 with a degree in American and Latin American Studies. He began to take photography seriously after he moved to Budapest in the mid-1990s.

In recent years Wheatley has focused on marginalized urban areas, with a particular interest in issues of youth and urban regeneration. He has spent considerable time in Amsterdam, where he photographed the end of the ‘liberal’ era. His reportage, “Liberal Limits", pictured subjects including veteran heroin addicts living in youth hostels, as well as disenchanted Moroccan youth.

Wheatley then returned to the UK where he began to photograph London’s council estates (public housing developments) in an attempt to explore some of the country's most impoverished areas. He composed a series of work around such subjects as the Lambeth Walk street market and the area around Elephant and Castle. Through his work on the estates, he became intimate with a number of youths who introduced him to “Grime", a culture based around British urban music in East London. As a result, he was offered numerous fashion projects, despite insisting, "My work isn't cool." Instead, he says, despite the glamour and style of some of the young people he documents, grime is a violent world in which people are often drawn into violence and drugs.

Simon Wheatley became a member of Magnum in 2005, and continues to live and work in the UK.

Education

1993 American and Latin American Studies, Manchester University

Exhibition

2006 FOAM in van Loon-Exploration - Museum van Loon, Amsterdam, Netherlands