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About Me
Steve Madden is a London-based Cambridge-educated non-fiction photographer. His love affair with photography began when he got his first camera at the age of 9, and started photographing things he found interesting in the streets while on holiday in Edinburgh.
His first photographs were awful, of course, but he learned quickly. He had no light-meter, and autofocus was thirty years in the future.
His first pictures were published – a front-page splash in his local newspaper – when he was only 14. He continued to find outlets for his photographs while at university, where he monopolised the college darkroom. His work has been published extensively in books, magazines and newspapers.
He’s never made photography his living, except for his first BBC job – in the darkrooms of BBC Pictorial Publicity.
His candid images of people would probably be known as “Street Photography”, but he doesn’t really like labels. None of his pictures are posed, set up or staged. He prefers to work with what he finds in the hurly-burly of busy places.
Born and bred in London, he has a mission to record the city he loves so much, in all its richness and diversity. But he’s equally at home making images wherever his travels take him, whether it’s a back-street in a European capital or a field in Wiltshire.
At the heart of it all, it’s people that obsess him, whatever they’re doing. If he were being particularly pretentious (and he hates pretentiousness) Steve would say he’s on a quest to make sense of the human condition in all its glory and absurdity. He finds that the harder you look, the less sense humanity makes, and it’s the job of the photographer to bear witness to all the different things that make us human. Journalism meets art.
Humour is there in many of his pictures, something which is scarcely surprising in a photographer who’s also a radio presenter, for 45 years committed to making people laugh at some of the unfunniest times of the day. He gets the greatest satisfaction when his pictures are puzzling, difficult to read, bizarre, unexpected, intriguing, just plain weird. The reaction he hopes for is “What the bleep?”
His first monograph – The Grind – was published by GOST Books in February 2025. Several other projects are in the pipeline.