PETER DENCH
How did your early life influence your work? H
As a teenager I was confused. I grew up in Weymouth, Dorset, which had a navy base and was a holiday destination. Every summer when the ships were in, the navy boys would be drinking and looking for love. Then you’d have the Bristoleans and the Brummies on holiday during factory shut-downs, drinking and looking for love. And the locals were always drinking heavily and looking for love. It was a monumentally messy, violent, gloriously saturated, primary-colour kind of place to spend my youth.
I loved it, but it wasn’t England as I saw it in the brochures or adverts. So I just wanted to put forward my understanding of what I saw, and tried to push my understanding of things I wasn’t familiar with.
How did you first get into photography?
My first passion in life was cricket, and I was a promising opening batsman for my school. But I could never quite get over the nerves of striding out to the crease with the real possibility of immediate failure. I found this anxiety so debilitating that I decided that I couldn’t push forward. So when I
