A photo blog about mostly analogue subjects and found objects

Sandy Connell, 5th April 2026

Dissatisfied with other means of casting my pictures into the digital sea, I decided to start Magpie as a place to share my photo work, my writing and scattered records of interesting things found in the course of making and enjoying art. Here, the body of work I can share rolls forward and morphs in ways that the bigger projects I may put on a Proper Website will not.

Magpie is for photos informed by curiosity (mine and the people around me) and tactility. One great joy of life is to encounter and collect interesting objects, taking them away with me in a photo or secreted into my pocket. There are many other artists like me and, eventually, Magpie will go beyond the limits of my work and include others' collections of scenes and objects.

If you subscribe to Magpie with your email address, you will receive a weekly post of photos and sparing descriptive text. Rather than overstuff each post with dozens of photos, I tend to share just a handful at a time, only publishing larger photo series at the end of the month. Most importantly each post will be an encouragement to slow down and enjoy looking at some pieces of artwork, not whizzing past photos as Content, not enduring flashing images in a relentless social media feed. Reading these short blog posts will be an unhurried experience.

Who I am (in part)

I am a photographer from West Sussex, currently living in London, mostly shooting on various 35mm SLR cameras that are older than I am. I got lost in filmmaking for several years before settling down and embracing photography as my main artistic medium. My practice was reborn in landscape photography then jumped across the spectrum of genres into live music photography (because I have the pleasure of living in South East London where a vibrant music scene is all but beating down my door). In between these two disparate genres, the rest of my work emerges, often unruly and difficult to categorise.

Naturally, I am an advocate of analogue photography and hands-on processes for making art. As such, most of the work I show here is shot on film and edited digitally only because I cannot possibly make time to take all of my negatives into the darkroom and make physical prints. But analogue über alles is not a hard and fast rule of mine. In a digital world, it sometimes takes a sly cameraphone and its slippery pixels to get the shot. Ultimately, The Best Camera is the one you have in your hands when you most need a camera.