Hugh Palmer bought his first camera shortly after seeing "Blow-Up", the Antonioni film in which the legendary Italian director sought to explore the explosion of pop culture in 1960's London. The desire to follow the example of the film's photographer hero was the keener as Hugh spent the sixties incarcerated in a single-sex boarding school in nearby Kent. Hard academic graft got him into Oxford University, however, where he spent four happy years taking photographs for the University magazine and newspaper, when he wasn't keeping up with his Latin and Greek studies. A post-graduate year at the London College of Printing was followed by a job as a ship's photographer.
After jumping ship in New York, he worked as a photographic assistant in some of the top advertising studios there before returning to the UK to look for editorial work. An inherited love of gardens and the natural landscape led to his specialising in garden photography , illustrating many books on the subject and supplying most of the major UK and European magazines with images and stories for many years. A lucky break with the great art house publishers Thames and Hudson led to a series of commissions to photograph the best-selling "Most Beautiful Villages" titles, which took him to France, Italy, Greece and Spain, as well as around the British Isles. Following the sad death of his longtime collaborator on the series, James Bentley, Hugh took up the writing of the books as well as the research and photography.
He now lives in Oxford, where he continues to write and take photographs, in addition to recent additions to his "career portfolio", as a counsellor, trainer and teacher.
