Lee Elkins

Lee Elkins is the founder and Creative Director of The Lost Light Recordings. Established in 2018, Lost Light Recordings is an independent publisher that works with photographers to realise projects through the medium of the photobook. The books he has created under the imprint since 2018, including Cian Oba-Smith’s Andover & Six Acres, Sadie Catt’s Woodstock and the forthcoming Harrowdown Hill by John Spinks, explore the political landscape and its effect on people and place.

Passionate about creating expressions of photographers’ work that reflect the integrity of their practice, Elkins collaborates creatively with both established photographic artists and new talent to create distinctive photobooks. Elkins manages the whole process of creating a book with intense detail: the editing and sequencing of photographs with the artist, the graphic design and materiality, personally overseeing the printing, and finally hand-binding the books. This attention to detail calls on Elkins’ previous experience as a master bookbinder in the printing industry and his conviction that the photobook can, in the right hands, become a complex intellectual dialogue between photographer and reader. Elkins worked as a bookbinder for twenty years in Frome, Somerset, for one of the UK’s most significant printers before gaining a first class BA (Hons) in Photography from the University of the West of England and an MA in Photography and the Book from Plymouth University.

Lee Elkins is Senior Lecturer in Photography at the University of the West of England, Bristol.