Telling stories without words
Tommy Hatwell is the professional photographer responsible for some of the magazine’s recent great cover shots, but he originally qualified as a watersports instructor and started out on life armed simply with a keen sense of adventure and a love of travel.
Tommy grew up in the Tavistock area and despite travelling far and wide across the globe he has always been drawn back to Devon. At Tavistock College he developed an interest in leisure and tourism and went on to study it at Duchy College, before being poached for the Adventure Activity Instructor course where he discovered a natural talent for kayaking. Qualified with a 5-star kayaking personal proficiency award and coaching level 4, he took a job as a river guide in the French Alps. The experience inspired him to get involved in filming a DVD kayaking guide for the area, as well as meeting several lifelong friends. The job also gave him the chance to amass £800, which was speedily invested in a ticket to Zambia, fulfilling an ambition to kayak the spectacular white-water of the Zambezi River. From Zambia he moved on to Morocco, alerted by a friend to a vacancy at a global rafting company. Tommy was flung in at the deep end and quickly had to get to grips with driving and river guiding in unfamiliar terrain, as well as taking videos and still photos of the participants – a 6-week ‘character building’ season.
Having stepped out of his comfort zone, these experiences initiated a 15-year globe-trotting existence, punctuated by the odd stopover in the UK when Tommy would put his ‘3-week plan’ into action to catch up with friends, find a job and earn some money before heading off to the next faraway destination. In 2008 he made his first trip to Uganda to kayak the world-famous Nile Special Wave, which has now disappeared in the aftermath of a new hydroelectric dam. The following year Tommy returned to Uganda, but this time his main purpose was to reconnect with some of the amazing people he had met on his previous trip.
Following a season in Croatia working on a moored superyacht, Tommy planned a trip to New Zealand, intending to spend his time kayaking and photographing. He bought a van and travelled the South Island with a kayaking friend, unfortunately encountering one of his few negative travel experiences when the van was broken into and all his kit was stolen. Although the kit was later returned, Tommy’s interest in photography was now building and kayaking was less of a draw. Ending up in Paihia on the North Island he got by with bar and hotel work until he managed to wangle a job on a boat photographing customers and local wildlife. One trip changed everything - happening to be in the right place at the right time he took an incredible photo of a killer whale leaping out of the water. He realised he needed to learn to take photos properly and in Queenstown for the winter, he took the gritty decision to spend his savings on a photography course with acclaimed photographers Jackie Ranken and Mike Langford, rather than a bungee jump. The six hours were motivational and photography was never the same from that day.
Tommy watched hours of YouTube videos and kept clicking away, gradually honing his photographic skills through a period working in retail in Bristol and a stint working bar jobs in Australia. It was during a moped trip through Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand that he unconsciously started taking portraits and despite the wonderful sights around him it was the connections with the local people that stayed with him, emboldening him to buy a high quality lens. In 2014 he decided to take a photographic degree in the UK, and although he benefitted from learning the theory, it left him wanting much more. He pulled the funds together to travel to India and Morocco building relationships and capturing images of the local people. In 2017 he went to Uganda again for his final year project, investing more of his hard-earned cash in specialist equipment. He spent five weeks living in the same village he had visited before, working for SOUL foundation (Supporting Opportunities for Ugandans to Learn). It was there he created ‘Night School’ which was selected from 6000 images for the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize exhibition in the London National Portrait Gallery.
Tommy is now a commercial photographer and his future plans include sharing his experiences with photographic students on organised trips to exotic places. Portraits are still his passion though and the wonderful connections he has made with people are the key to the stories told by his photographs.