Roger Brown - Visual Ethnographer

"I'm a documentary photographer and think of my work as both photography and anthropology. What I'm trying to do in Stoke is a visual ethnography, a deep immersion into a community. It's a very fragmented community and I've been concentrating on the more elderly of the population - the ones who are most effected by the changes taking place here. I like to work from the inside out, trying not to work like a journalist by just dropping in. I prefer to work with a much more substantial understanding to the place and it's people and the life and the culture, understanding how the whole thing begins to knit together.

If you said to me go anywhere I would go to Papua New Guinea. I've been fascinated by places like that ever since I was young when I used to read about Captain Cook and his travelers tales and exploits. That kind of thing is very romantic. The advantage I've got here is I speak the language, I've lived here for 25 years, I feel as though I already know a lot about Stoke-on-Trent. But the core problems for anthropologists are essentially the same, finding the right people to talk to, finding the gatekeepers."