Off the wall

A love of the Lakes

IT’S QUITE a leap from working as a health and safety officer at Sellafield, Cumbria, to becoming a gallery owner in Keswick, but it’s one that Stuart McGlennon made – and within only a few years of taking up photography, too.

In the summer of 2015, he started to take pictures as an adjunct to his pastime of hillwalking, but soon the desire to make photographs took over and became the priority. He was a regular on AP’s own forum and received encouragement and feedback in our appraisal gallery. And he reached a turning point in his photography pretty quickly. ‘It’s like any other hobby,’ he says. ‘People start out by imitating photographers and going to certain locations – you get a nice picture and come away happy. Eventually that wears off, however, and you want to put your own spin on things. That period of wanting to shoot honeypot locations didn’t last long for me. I’m quite challenge driven and it didn’t feel like a challenge to repeat the same shots everyone else was producing.’

As a result, despite living in the Lake District – where you’d be forgiven for thinking that every inch has been photographed – he actively shot views and locations that others may not have seen. It garnered him some attention, and he began to supply a few prints to a small gallery in Keswick. Then, early in 2018, the owner of the gallery asked Stuart if he’d be interested in taking it over. ‘At first, I thought it was a bit of a joke,’ he says. ‘But I’d got stuck in a rut of working shifts at