Cameron Newham (born 1965) is an

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-born

British British may refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * British people, nationals or natives of the United Kingdom, British Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies. * British national identity, the characteristics of British people and culture ...

photographer, author, and independent heritage documentarian. He is best known for his ongoing effort to photograph every rural parish church in England, a project that has spanned more than two decades and produced over 500,000 images from more than 9,000 churches.

Biography

Born in

South Yarra South Yarra is an inner-city suburb in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 4 km south-east of Melbourne's Central Business District, located within the Cities of Melbourne and Stonnington local government areas. South Yarra recorded a populati ...

Melbourne Melbourne ( , ; Boonwurrung language, Boonwurrung/ or ) is the List of Australian capital cities, capital and List of cities in Australia by population, most populous city of the States and territories of Australia, Australian state of Victori ...

, on 12 August 1965, Newham was educated at

Camberwell Grammar School Camberwell Grammar School is an independent, single sex, Anglican primary and secondary day school for boys, located in Canterbury, an eastern suburb of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Camberwell Church of England Grammar School was founde ...

and

Scotch College, Perth Scotch College (informally known as Scotch or SC), is an Independent school, independent Uniting Church in Australia, Uniting Church Primary school, primary and Secondary school, secondary school for boys, located in the Perth suburb of Swanbo ...

, before completing a BSc in information technology and geography at the

University of Western Australia University of Western Australia (UWA) is a public research university in the Australian state of Western Australia. The university's main campus is in Crawley, Western Australia, Crawley, a suburb in the City of Perth local government area. UW ...

in 1987. He began his career as a software engineer with

Australian Defence Industries Thales Australia (formerly Australian Defence Industries and ADI Limited) is a defence contractor based in Australia. It is a subsidiary of the French defence technology conglomerate Thales Group. Thales Australia had been engaged in numerous ...

in 1989 and, during that period, co-authored ''Learning the Bash Shell'' for

O’Reilly Media O'Reilly Media, Inc. (formerly O'Reilly & Associates) is an American learning company established by Tim O'Reilly that provides technical and professional skills development courses via an online learning platform. O'Reilly also publishes bo ...

. Newham relocated to the

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Northwestern Europe, off the coast of European mainland, the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotlan ...

in 1996 from

Perth Perth () is the list of Australian capital cities, capital city of Western Australia. It is the list of cities in Australia by population, fourth-most-populous city in Australia, with a population of over 2.3 million within Greater Perth . The ...

Western Australia Western Australia (WA) is the westernmost state of Australia. It is bounded by the Indian Ocean to the north and west, the Southern Ocean to the south, the Northern Territory to the north-east, and South Australia to the south-east. Western Aust ...

and has since held a range of information-technology posts, including positions at

Nomura Research Institute is the largest economic research and consulting firm in Japan, and a member of the Nomura Group. Established in 1965, the firm now employs over 13,000 people. It owns ten subsidiaries in Japan and multiple subsidiaries overseas, in India, New Y ...

Macromedia Macromedia, Inc. was an American graphics, multimedia, and web development software company headquartered in San Francisco, California, that made products such as Adobe Flash, Flash and Adobe Dreamweaver, Dreamweaver. It was purchased by its riv ...

and the

British Library The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom. Based in London, it is one of the largest libraries in the world, with an estimated collection of between 170 and 200 million items from multiple countries. As a legal deposit li ...

, while pursuing large-scale photographic fieldwork. Newham began photographing rural parish churches in 1997, and was initially inspired by the architectural guides of

Nikolaus Pevsner Sir Nikolaus Bernhard Leon Pevsner (30 January 1902 – 18 August 1983) was a German-British art historian and architectural historian best known for his monumental 46-volume series of county-by-county guides, ''The Buildings of England'' (195 ...

, later drawing on the early-20th-century books of John Stabb after encountering them during a 2007 project on Devon churches. His project gradually expanded to include the detailed documentation of church architecture, sculpture and interior features such as pre-1900

monuments A monument is a type of structure that was explicitly created to commemorate a person or event, or which has become relevant to a social group as a part of their remembrance of historic times or cultural heritage, due to its artistic, historical ...

fonts In movable type, metal typesetting, a font is a particular #Characteristics, size, weight and style of a ''typeface'', defined as the set of fonts that share an overall design. For instance, the typeface Bauer Bodoni (shown in the figure) inclu ...

and wall paintings. By the mid-2020s, Newham had photographed more than 9,000 churches and compiled an archive exceeding 500,000 images. His work has been used by scholars in the fields of medieval architecture, sculpture and funerary art. Newham's photographs of knightly effigies were featured in Tobias Capwell’s monograph ''Armour of the English Knight 1400–1450'', and were praised for offering overhead views that emulate a devotional perspective. Newham has also contributed to the Post-Reformation Wall Painting Project (PRWP), a scholarly initiative cataloguing later church murals in England. Newham’s 728-page book entitled ''Country Church Monuments'', published in 2022, received notice across both popular and academic press; reviewers in the ''

Literary Review ''Literary Review'' is a British literary magazine founded in 1979 by Anne Smith, then head of the Department of English at the University of Edinburgh. Its offices are on Lexington Street in Soho. The magazine was edited for fourteen years b ...

'', ''

The Times ''The Times'' is a British Newspaper#Daily, daily Newspaper#National, national newspaper based in London. It began in 1785 under the title ''The Daily Universal Register'', adopting its modern name on 1 January 1788. ''The Times'' and its si ...

'', ''

The Daily Telegraph ''The Daily Telegraph'', known online and elsewhere as ''The Telegraph'', is a British daily broadsheet conservative newspaper published in London by Telegraph Media Group and distributed in the United Kingdom and internationally. It was found ...

'' and ''

The Antiquaries Journal ''The'' is a grammatical article in English, denoting nouns that are already or about to be mentioned, under discussion, implied or otherwise presumed familiar to listeners, readers, or speakers. It is the definite article in English. ''The ...

'' highlighted its authoritative commentary, comprehensive scope and high quality photography of 365 rural monuments.

Selected works

* * *

References

External links

National Churches Trust: #ChurchExplorer
{{DEFAULTSORT:Newham, Cameron Living people English photographers Australian emigrants to the United Kingdom Fellows of the Society of Antiquaries of London People from South Yarra, Victoria 1965 births