The bigger picture

The tolerant, welcoming, vibrant culture of the city of Brighton and Hove makes it a great place to live. One of its flaws, however, is its lack of decent employment. Vast swathes of the working population board commuter trains to London each morning, while many others are self-employed. And as for manufacturing, well…

But one company is bucking that trend and creating a small beacon of light in the manufacturing wilderness. Nearly five years ago, recent graduate Max Grew found himself moving into a workshop in order to be able to service the orders from an unexpectedly successful Kickstarter campaign. The product? A simple but slick 5x4in camera made from high-quality birch ply and anodised aluminium, with bellows constructed from coated nylon. Called the Intrepid Camera, its launch was the start of a real story of success.

‘I was doing a degree in product design at Sussex University,’ says Max, Intrepid Camera’s founder. We are sitting in the informal coffee area of the shared industrial building near the back of Brighton station, ‘and I used photography as a way of making my college portfolio – and some not very well-thought-out ideas – a