Michael Palmer FRPS

It gives me the greatest pleasure to report that Michael Palmer has achieved his Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society, with a splendid panel of black and white images in the Contemporary category. Michael’s ‘Periods of Lockdown’ theme was Covid related, and his images portray the strange times we were living in, including his own sense of enforced isolation and growing despair and fear. His panel so evocatively illustrates how his thoughts had become increasingly ‘darker’, and how this unwittingly influenced his photography which had turned bleak and ‘eccentric’, which he captured through in-camera blurring and distortion.

You may have caught some of Michael’s work on this at the North Mundham Exhibition earlier this year. The very positive response to it then was certainly a counter to any feeling of despair Michael still have harboured, not least he had already made an unsuccessful submission with this work for Visual Art assessment. This encouragement was a key driver in Michael revisiting the work and resubmitting a refreshed panel, this time to Contemporary, where the excellent fit of his images to his Statement of Intent and the quality of his image making made for a successful submission. During those awful protracted periods of lockdown, I managed to walk or cycle locally most days, strug

Kudos to Michael for his determination and many, many congratulations on his success.

The featured images are from Michael Palmer’s successful FRPS panel