My husband, David Reid, who has died aged 73, began his working life as a postman before becoming an engineer – and then a photographer and photography lecturer.
As a photographer much of David’s earliest work was landscape, but later he focused more on portraiture – mostly of a highly arranged nature. After he became less active he made dioramas using found objects.
He leaves many beautiful images but also a number of sound and video recordings of contemporary music, as well as numerous experimental sound works. There have been many exhibitions of his photography and video art throughout the UK since 1995, but also in Spain, Turkey, Portugal, Australia and the Netherlands.
David was born in Liverpool to Henry, a baker, and Elizabeth (nee Jones), a shop worker. After leaving Croxteth secondary school he worked as a postman from 1966 to 1972, studying part-time for A-levels before enrolling as a mature student at the University of Lancaster to study physics.
After graduation in 1978 he became a processing engineer, and then manager, at the Philips semiconductor factory in Stockport, Greater Manchester. While working there he took up photography as a hobby, becoming engrossed in all its facets with characteristic single-mindedness.
He gave up working for Philips in 1992 to take a full-time MA in photography at the University of Derby, emerging with a distinction in 1994. Afterwards he became a lecturer in photography at Derby and at John Moores University, Liverpool, then a senior lecturer at Nottingham Trent University from 2004 until his retirement in 2016, having completed a PhD in photographic studies at the University of Derby in 2000.
We met in Macclesfield in Cheshire, in 1989 at a performance of Romeo and Juliet by the Royal Shakespeare Company, and married in 1996, living over the years in the Derbyshire villages of Bollington and Melbourne before moving to Sheffield in 2014.
David’s engagement with the world was eclectic and multi-faceted, with a richness of outlook that embraced the lives of many. Until cancer struck around two years ago, he was a keen runner and cyclist, and also kept his brain active in many ways, including by reading, listening to music and drawing. He continued to work on his photography to the end, taking off in many different directions from the quirky to the beautiful.
He is survived by me, my two children, Chris and Sophie, from a previous relationship, and his brother Ken.
