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Bill Ward
Bill Ward is a multi-award winning photographer and actor, born and raised in Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
He’s an Ambassador for Pentax Ricoh UK, on the Pro-Team for 3LeggedThing, & a Tour Leader for Light and Land. He gives talks on photography all over the world.
An actor for 25 years, he has appeared in over 30 TV Shows and Films, and 50 Plays. Though well known for his TV work, Bill's theatre work includes multiple plays in London’s West End, UK Tours, and Rep Theatre.
Charlotte Parkin
Head of Marketing & Sub Editor for On Landscape. Dabble in digital photography, open water swimmer, cooking buff & yogi.
Bill is a photographer whose work is shaped by experience rather than observation alone. His images feel lived, and emotionally direct, often placing the viewer within the landscape rather than at a comfortable distance from it. Ward’s route into photography was anything but linear. After beginning his working life in advertising, where clarity of ideas and originality were paramount, he retrained as an actor and has since sustained a long and successful career on stage and screen. Photography emerged later as a necessary counterweight, a quieter, more solitary practice rooted in instinct, presence, and attention.
You began your working life as an advertising executive, then moved into a long and successful acting career, and now you are known for your landscape photography. Can you tell us more about that journey and how each stage led to the next?
Well, I’d like to say it’s been one long, seamless, meticulously planned voyage, but actually it’s all been way more haphazard than that, although it’s generally made a fair amount of sense at the time. A lot of it has been about following my nose, having a bit of a feeling, and then taking a very deep breath and trying to do something about it.
I worked for two of the big UK Ad Agencies, BBH and Saatchi & Saatchi, as an Account Director and Strategic Planner for a decade or so after coming out of University. I’ve got a History Degree, but I’d always been fascinated by adverts on the tele growing up. Human behaviour, what makes people do what they do, and why they do it, is essentially the raw material of both Advertising and History, also Acting, but we’ll come on to that!
I loved Advertising for the ideas, the purity of them in particular - having 30 seconds to tell a story as clearly and as concisely and memorably as you can. But it also taught me the importance of originality - the value of creativity and original thought.
I went travelling for a couple of years in my late 20’s and early 30’s, there was so much of the world that I hadn’t seen, and I was feeling a little bit empty at the time and that I really needed to put something new and unexpected back in - and when I came back, I took the plunge and did the only other thing I’d ever truly wanted to do, which was be an actor. ’d done loads of plays through school and university, and had loved the freedom of it, the self expression of it, the exploration of it. So I put myself through drama school when I was 32, came out when I was 33, and I’ve been an actor ever since.