Chris King is from the north of Ireland, and works internationally on commissioned work, personal projects and collaborations, across photography, film, writing and podcasts. His work centres on the people actively building alternatives to the way things are. He shares their stories in their own words and with care for how they are represented, to show that change is possible and to give people the means to act on it.
Changing the Narrative
Most of Chris’s current work now sits under Changing the Narrative, the independent, member-supported media platform he founded. It pursues system change through cultural change, and cultural change through narrative change. Through podcasts, articles and photo stories, it challenges the prevailing narratives about how our societies have to function, and shares the stories of people building functioning alternatives in economics, climate and food systems. The aim is to change minds rather than preach to the converted: to show how an alternative works, rather than only criticise the conventional model.
How the approach was formed
Chris graduated from Glasgow University with an Honours Degree in Aeronautical Engineering (BEng Hons), specialising in spaceflight, and later from Southampton University with a Masters in Engineering for Development (MSc), after two years working with grassroots environmental and social justice organisations across Europe.
He went on to live and work in France, Cambodia, Australia, Egypt and Morocco – from impact assessments of disaster relief projects, to volunteering with one of the founders of the permaculture movement, to leading adventure tours into the Sinai, the Sahara and up the High Atlas mountains.
Working with grassroots organisations, and particularly in Cambodia, where he carried out participatory research with remote communities to assess the impact of a water project run by a disaster relief organisation, gave him a lasting sense of the importance of representation, and of the means to share the voices of those who often go unheard. That understanding underpins everything since.
Long-form projects
Food Is Wasted – a long-term project on avoidable food waste, with a dedicated site created to share the exploration as it happened and to make the causes, consequences and solutions accessible to a general audience. It began locally, with the waste produced within London, then moved onto farms across the UK, and on to Denmark, Italy and Portugal. From the outset the approach was human-centric and solutions-focused: sharing the voices of people already working to reduce the amount of edible food going to waste.
Industrial Borderlands – a photo essay and meditation on the relationship between industrialised societies and the natural world, photographed across Britain, Ireland and France. It looks at what industrialised societies keep out of view and what they have become numb to – the pylons, quarries, warehouses and sewage works that sustain the lives we lead – and at the belief, underneath all of it, that humans sit apart from the rest of Nature. The work has been exhibited in Perpignan, and is now a Changing the Narrative project.
Green Surge – an independent, self-funded photographic and audio project documenting people who joined the Green Party during the membership surge that began in May 2014. Each participant was photographed and asked the same set of questions about what brought them to the party, so the range of people and motivations behind the numbers could be seen and heard directly.
Supporting other storytellers
Documentary Storytellers was founded by Chris in 2014 to promote the work of documentary photographers and filmmakers of all levels driven by a desire to have impact. Over time it became a space for examining the practice itself: how storytellers can avoid contributing to the very issues they document, how to work ethically with communities they are not part of, and how photography and film can be used as tools for change rather than simply ways of informing.
Documentary Storytellers is now a Changing the Narrative project, and its thinking on representation, ethics and impact carries directly into how CTN works today. [Archived]
Documenting Climate Change was set up to carry out participatory photographic projects with people at the frontline of climate change, and to build an international community of documentary storytellers offering support, training and opportunities to collaborate with academics and other storytellers. [Archived]
Commissions
Chris takes on commissioned photography and video work alongside the independent projects. Please get in touch to discuss commissions, exhibitions or any other enquiry.
Some of my previous clients
