Celebrated photographer and Salford alumnus Craig Easton given honorary degree

Craig Easton is a passionate documentary photographer and historian who has received worldwide praise for his photographs which authentically represent communities in the North of England and seek to challenge media stereotypes.

A graduate of Salford’s BSc Physics programme in 1989, Craig has gone on to receive honours such as Photographer of the Year at the 2021 Sony World Photography Awards and is the author of the highly-acclaimed monographs Thatcher’s Children (2023) and Bank Top (2022).

Thatcher’s Children was a long-term project developed over three decades that explored the inter-generational nature of poverty and economic hardship as experienced one extended family from Blackpool whilst Bank Top is a collaboration with writer Abdul Aziz Hafiz that challenges the media portrayal of Blackburn as ‘the most segregated town in Britain’.

The two projects were exhibited together under the title “Is Anybody Listening?” by the University at our New Adelphi Building in Autumn 2023 where they were viewed by hundreds of young people across Salford.

Craig’s relationship with photography and the University stems back to his time here in the 1980s, when he first picked up a camera and started documenting the world around him.

He said: “The University of Salford is where I discovered photography. It was a very political time and the first photos I made were on protest matches here in the UK but I was also interested in humanitarian issues across the developing world and was involved in student politics and debates”

“At the end of my degree, I worked briefly for a few months to save some cash and then travelled through Canada and the US, across Mexico and into Central America down to Nicaragua (which was holding its first democratic elections after the Sandinista Revolution of 1979) just to try and take some photographs. It was the result of that trip that propelled me into the industry and after that, I never looked back.”

Craig said that it was in the halls of Salford where he was first exposed to the concept of a photojournalism and became convinced that it was the career for him.

He said: “Before arriving at university, I had seen a Sebastião Salgado show somewhere in about 1985 or 1986 and I asked my parents for a camera for my birthday.

“So I got this little camera and just starting playing with it.”

“Then I was in the university library one day and I discovered a little section where they had books by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa. I was looking at this stuff and suddenly realized that you could make a living as a photographer and had a sort of lightbulb moment. I was looking at all this work by these great documentarians and thought, ‘ah, there's another way’”.

“I spent three years at Salford and I became a photographer there because it opened my eyes to what the world had to offer. Beyond the lecture theatres and the lab, it was about the people I met, about culture and what was happening in the world around me. It was about politics and the friends I made and all those kinds of things.”

The accolade was a ‘bolt from the blue’ for Craig but the alumnus says that he really appreciated it considering the partnership he has forged with Salford over the years.

“I wasn’t really expecting it at all”, he said. “It was a surprise but I have built a lovely relationship with the University where we have both given and received a lot of support for each other’s work over recent years.

"It’s lovely to receive awards and get accolades from your peers, of course, and I hope it means I will have more opportunities to speak to students and try and use my experience to inspire young photographers of the future.”

In terms of his next steps, Craig is preparing to release his next book An Extremely Un-get-atable Place: George Orwell on Jura. 

The book is the first of three made in the Scottish Islands and is a lyrical exploration and re-imagining of the time that Orwell spent in a remote farmhouse on the Isle of Jura in the Scottish Hebrides when he wrote his celebrated novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. 

On the book, Craig added: “I’ve wanted to make this work about Orwell for a long, long time and in some senses, it’s a reaction to my previous works, like Thatcher’s Children. 

“I think we’re at a point where we can get so bogged down in the politics of the world or the things that are going on right now that we forget that it is joyous to be alive and we should be celebrating more of those moments. 

“I was exploring that feeling, the same feeling that Orwell had when went to live on Jura, and the reason why he wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four. He went there to build a new life, to celebrate life and it was his concerns for the future that led him to writing his great warning to the world.”

As for his advice to the photography students of 2025, Craig said: “I would say that you need to absolutely love photography. You have to have a passion for it and be prepared to give everything to it. But most importantly, photograph what you truly care about.”