Chris King is from the north of Ireland, and works internationally on commissioned work, personal projects and collaborations. He works across photography, film, writing and podcasts, and his approach has stayed consistent across all of it: share the voices and activities of people, focus on those already doing the work, and let an audience draw its own conclusions.
Changing the Narrative
Most of Chris’s current work sits under Changing the Narrative — an independent, ad-free, member-supported platform challenging prevailing social and economic narratives.
The platform publishes across three labels:
- Changing the Narrative — conversations with people who have helped build a different way of running things: an economy, an organisation, a community. Not the theory of it, but the reality on the ground.
- How (Not) To Do Business — stories of breaking convention. Companies that refuse the usual rules on who owns a business, who makes the decisions and who gets paid what, and succeed anyway.
- Stories From Within — hyperlocal documentary storytelling: on communities, by the communities. [In development]
A new podcast episode publishes every Tuesday, alternating between the two interview strands, in both audio and video. Guests to date include worker co-operatives, economic historians, lawyers and policy practitioners working on public ownership, democratic ownership and the rights of nature.
The editorial approach is revelation through working examples rather than advocacy or debunking. The audience Chris is writing and recording for are people whose doubt about an alternative comes from not having seen one working, rather than from fundamentally opposing it — so the guest is the trusted source, and the platform is the channel.
How the approach was formed
Chris graduated from Glasgow University with an Honours Degree in Aeronautical Engineering (BEng Hons), specialising in spaceflight, and later from Southampton University with a Masters in Engineering for Development (MSc), after two years working with grassroots environmental and social justice organisations across Europe.
He went on to live and work in France, Cambodia, Australia, Egypt and Morocco — from impact assessments of disaster relief projects, to volunteering with one of the founders of the permaculture movement, to leading adventure tours into the Sinai, the Sahara and up the High Atlas mountains.
Working with grassroots organisations, and particularly in Cambodia, where he carried out participatory research with remote communities to assess the impact of a water project run by a disaster relief organisation, gave him a lasting sense of the importance of representation, and of the means to share the voices of those who often go unheard. That understanding underpins everything since.
Long-form projects
Food Is Wasted — a long-term project on avoidable food waste, with a dedicated site created to share the exploration as it happened and to make the causes, consequences and solutions accessible to a general audience. It began locally, with the waste produced within London, then moved onto farms across the UK, and on to Denmark, Italy and Portugal. From the outset the approach was human-centric and solutions-focused: sharing the voices of people already working to reduce the amount of edible food going to waste.
Industrial Borderlands — a photo essay and meditation on the relationship between industrialised societies and the natural world, photographed across Britain, Ireland and France. It looks at what industrialised societies keep out of view and what they have become numb to — the pylons, quarries, warehouses and sewage works that sustain the lives we lead — and at the belief, underneath all of it, that humans sit apart from the rest of Nature. The work has been exhibited in Perpignan, and is now a Changing the Narrative project.
Green Surge — an independent, self-funded photographic and audio project documenting people who joined the Green Party during the membership surge that began in May 2014. Each participant was photographed and asked the same set of questions about what brought them to the party, so the range of people and motivations behind the numbers could be seen and heard directly.
Supporting other storytellers
Documenting Climate Change was set up to carry out participatory photographic projects with people at the frontline of climate change, and to build an international community of documentary storytellers offering support, training and opportunities to collaborate with academics and other storytellers.[Archived]
Documentary Storytellers was created to promote documentary storytelling more generally — showcasing work, providing support and organising virtual events. [Archived]
Commissions
Chris takes on commissioned photography and video work alongside the independent projects. Please get in touch to discuss commissions, exhibitions or any other enquiry.
Some of my previous clients
