Tom Barnes

Nelayan are traditional Indonesian Fishermen, fishing from small boats for Lemuru or Petek, small sardine-like fish. In the mid-1990s, plastic started washing up on the beaches and replacing fish in the nets. This is a blog about my latest personal project,  a tough one to shoot – beautiful places blighted by plastic and waste with locals who feel helpless. To see the full gallery…

I was commissioned by the Sunday Times magazine to photograph Dame Hilary Mantel, the author of Wolf Hall. Shot on location at Exeter Cathedral Hilary was an absolutely fantastic subject, we talked about how this press campaign for the third and final book of the trilogy is very different from the first book release in 2009. Hilary told me how there were hundreds of…

Before lockdown I had the pleasure of shooting the NHS staff at St Georges hospital for the latest series of 24 Hours in A&E for Channel 4. This is the third series I have shot for the channel and every time it’s a privilege to meet new members of the team as well as catching up with the staff I had met before. One of…

I was, as I’m sure a lot of you are, utterly sick of endless chargers and cables. A mess of wires that always seem to get tangled and it always ends up looking like Medusa on a bad hair day, so I decided to create my own custom charger board. I’ve tried various things over the years, I’ve tried to hide them in drawers,…

In September myself and my assistant Morgan flew to the USA to take portraits at Wasteland Weekend festival, a fully immersive post apocalyptic festival in the Mojave Desert. The full project gallery is here with the finished portraits. The images below are extra shots from the festival I took while walking round, separate from the portraits you can see more of the vehicles and…

I took a short flight over to Milan to shoot the legendary Metallica for a Kerrang! magazine cover. We landed, and the heavens opened, drenching everything. I had a small dual studio set up backstage at the 85,000 capacity sold-out venue. After I’d set up, I took a break and grabbed some food. I’d been told by an old friend of mine to ask…

I popped down to the south coast to photograph the father and son combination of Nick and Harris Reed for The Sunday Times Magazine. Nick is an Oscar-winning documentary producer, one of the British Hollywood elite, and Harris is a fashion designer whose designs have been worn by Harry Styles, Naomi Campbell and Cara Delevigne. We ran about for an hour and threw about…