More about the project
In September 2005, Tim Andrews, then aged 54 and a successful country solicitor, was driving back to his home in Milford, Surrey on the M1 when his left thumb began to shake. His life was about to change forever.
A month later, he was diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease and within nine months, he was forced to take early retirement. He had no shortage of things to do; he loved cricket and the cinema and he set about writing his memoirs.
However, another drastic change in his life occurred in May 2007 when he noticed an advertisement in ''Time Out'' asking for people to volunteer to be photographed in the nude by a professional photographer, Graeme Montgomery. ''I thought, why not?" says Tim "I was no longer a lawyer and there was no need to be concerned about my reputation or that of my firm''. So, he went along and was photographed. Unusually, in these days of online advertising, there were two more advertisements in the following two issues of Time Out this time for ordinary portraits. Tim replied to both and was duly photographed.
That was that until, in March 2008, after responding to an advert in a local paper, Tim went on the Internet and found several photographers advertising for models for specific projects. ''I wrote to the first saying that 'I would like to continue on the path of being photographed by different people during the course of my illness' and, as I wrote those words, I realised that I had a project of my own'', says Tim. Since then, he has been photographed by over 220 photographers, some student and some amateur but mostly professional including Rankin, Mike McCartney, Harry Borden, Jillian Edelstein, Vanessa Winship and Steve Bloom.
His project has been featured on the Culture Show on BBC TV and in The Times, The Guardian, The British Journal of Photography, The Big Issue and Photography Monthly. There have been exhibitions at the Lightbox Gallery in Woking, the Guernsey Photography Festival and in Southport, Merseyside with three more exhibitions scheduled for 2013.