Aakschipper Images
In 2009 on his 60th birthday Graham Rhodes opened a small gallery exhibiting a selection of his unique art photographs. This gallery is in an unusual location, above the public conveniences, halfway along Scarborough’s West Pier in a grade-two listed building that once housed a company buying and selling fish. In the last two years he has sold over seven hundred of his framed images. His work was accepted by a German web site called posterlounge where his work has proved very popular selling more than 100 images in the first 18 months. Today Graham finds himself being compared to and labelled as Scarborough ’s answer to the Victorian great, Frank Meadow Sutcliffe.

Graham Rhodes has been manipulating images all his working life. As a book and record sleeve designer creating images for such clients as Octopus Books, The Cramps (inc possibly the first ever 3D sleeve), The Police (the band not the force!), then an audio-visual designer, a video director and conference producer. In his time he designed product launches for Monster Munch, new car launches for Volvo and Rover, public information films for the Home Office and Yorkshire Water, and in the heritage sector, created numerous programmes for various museums including the Jorvik Viking Centre, The Scottish Museum of Antiquities, Merseyside Maritime Museum and the York Story that ran for a number of years in the centre of York.

After eighteen years in London he returned to Yorkshire heading up the production arm of a York based company. In 2001, now a full time scriptwriter for both corporate videos and computer games inc Yager, (European Game of the year 2005) he moved to Scarborough where he founded a small pub based theater company. However his purchase of a digital camera galvanised him to take his own photographs. Recognising the computer was a unique opportunity to mutate both image and colour, he took some months out to learn Photoshop techniques, allowing him to realize his own personal artistic interpretation of the scene.

“My aim is to create photographic images that create a sense of timelessness through manipulation of colour and tone thus allowing the viewer to choose their own interpretation of the image and its rightful place in time and location.”

To see a range of Grahams images please see his web site at
www.aakschipperimages.com

To see Graham book Harbourside please follow this link -- http://www.blurb.com/my/book/detail/2507706

For a background to Graham and a look at his wide and varied career - www.grahamrhodes.com

Interview with Graham Rhodes in Creative Boom Magazine about his Leeds connections and influences –
http://www.creativeboom.co.uk/leeds/2009/11/25/interview-with-graham-rhodes/