The galleries on this site feature pictures made while I was travelling or working in Australia, China, Britain, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and the United States. I taught myself the basics of photography by looking at the work of the great photographers in libraries and bookshops. Apart from two years as a staff photographer for the Examiner newspaper in Launceston, Tasmania, I've been an amateur photographer.
I took the photographs of the international cricket scene while working as a cricket writer for various Australian newspapers. They were a personal project done mostly in my spare time. Many of them were included in two photography books I published: Cricket: the Game Behind the Game (1994) and Cricket Masala (2001).
The photographs of China resulted from the 2 1/2 years I spent working as a copy editor for China Daily in Beijing. I'd never been to China before starting at the paper in November 2010. Unless captioned otherwise, all China photographs were taken in Beijing. The photographs of the US were taken in 2015 and 2018 on brief family visits.
Generally, I think photographs should be allowed to speak for themselves. If they need detailed captions or lengthy explanations, they're probably failures. The pictures in Highlands are somewhat different, in that they are of the people and lives I saw in five Ming Dynasty villages near the Great Wall in Hebei province, about 90 kilometres northwest of central Beijing. Most weekends during the winter and spring of 2013-14 I visited these villages, where the people welcomed me warmly. In the end, I decided to interview and write about them as well as photograph them.
*Photographs & text copyright Mark Ray
*Prints of all photographs available on request
*Email: mark.ray@gmail.com