He is now a photographer but years ago Graham Uden took a gamble by switching careers
It's the ultimate in career satisfaction. Being paid to do a job that's been a lifetime passion. And photographer Graham Uden has managed to pull that off successfully. But that's not to say there hasn't been a lot of hard graft along the way.
Uden's story is one of determination and dedicated planning to switch from his previous career as a graphic designer and he's never looked back. One of his rules, he said, was that once he left graphic design he wouldn't go back to it, however hard it was to become a photographer and however tempting it was to take on graphic design jobs.
Uden comes from a creative family. 'My dad's cousin is Patrick Uden, who is a filmmaker. I have a couple of cousins who are graphic and fashion designers,' he said. 'When I was very young, my father always used to give me his old cameras every time he moved on to a new model. From when I was nine years old I always had a camera.'
There's plenty of family photographs of a youthful Uden, camera clutched in hand. But photography is not regarded as a particularly 'safe' career. 'There aren't many courses for photographers,' he explained. 'When I was at high school, a teacher suggested graphic design. At the age of 17 and 18, photography seemed to be a difficult profession to go into. It seemed highly competitive and I didn't have any formal training.'
So Uden headed to Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication in London to study graphic design. He was a graphic designer from when he left college at the age of 22 until he switched to photography at the age of 31, but his decision to change careers wasn't easy. 'I did corporate design, logos, brochures', but even then Uden found himself including plenty of photography in his work.
'I was like a closet photographer. But the problem was when you have a certain job you're really pigeonholed,' he said. 'If you do corporate logos, you can't do packaging. This kind of environment puts you off changing disciplines, let alone your career.'