NIALL McDIARMID

H OW did you get into photography?

I was brought up in Aberfeldy, a small village in Perthshire, but I moved south to England to study Engineering at university. However, I wasn’t cut out for engineering and didn’t really like it. Instead, I got a job as a reporter in the trade press for about 18 months.

During that time I became very friendly with the photographers who were working there. I liked what they were doing and thought it was something I could do. So in the early 1990s, I went to the London College of Printing to study photojournalism. I did that for a year, and have been a freelancer since then. I haven’t really had any proper jobs.

What kinds of professional work have you done?

I’ve done a variety of commercial and editorial work, mostly portrait-based. A lot of it has been done for book publishers, such as covers and author portraits. I was