Homer Warwick Sykes (born January 1949) is a Canadian-born British documentary photographer[1] whose career has included personal projects and landscape photography.
The couple were married in Shanghai in August 1947; but in June 1948, at an early stage of his wife's pregnancy, Homer was killed in an accident at Lunghua airfield.
[3] In the summer vacation during his first year, he went to New York, and was impressed by the work of current photographers – Cartier-Bresson, Davidson, Friedlander, Frank, Uzzle and Winogrand – that he saw at the Museum of Modern Art.
[4] Sykes' photography of these festivals was inspired by that of Benjamin Stone, but he approached them with a modern sensibility and a small-format camera, "[trying] to include the unintended participants and to document the unfolding drama in a contemporary urban environment".
[5] After viewing a touring exhibition of Stone and Sykes' photography of "festivals, customs and pageants", Colin MacInnes wrote that: Although these photographs do great credit to Sykes both as a photographer and as a social investigator, it should not be thought that his interests lie exclusively in the direction of barrel parades, beating the bounds, or the Queensferry burryman (who saunters around the boozers looking like a floral dalek on appropriate occasions).
Annie-Laure Wanaverbecq of Maison de la photographie Robert Doisneau writes that "Observing his countrymen with humour and curiosity, over several years [Sykes] produced a fabulous visual archive of a nation in crisis and beset by doubt.
[1][10] Michaël Houlette of Maison de la photographie Robert Doisneau writes: The combination of several people in the same frame characterizes most of the photographs by Homer Sykes selected for [an exhibition of his work of the 1970s].
Sykes photographed the British landscape, as well as pubs, prehistoric remains and other scenes in Britain, for various books published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
In 2014, Maison de la photographie Robert Doisneau (Gentilly, Paris) held a major exhibition of Sykes' work from the 1970s.