Simon Hipkins is a visionary documentary filmmaker and photographer whose life’s work dances between the stillness of captured moments and the fluidity of time-based narratives. 

With a career spanning over two decades, Simon has carved a distinctive path through these two mediums - using each one as a counterpoint and complement to the other - photography as a frozen moment of curiosity, film as a means to capture the unfolding narrative of the world’s evolution. 

Born with an innate restlessness and a keen eye for the overlooked, Simon began his creative life in photography, a medium that offered him an immediate, tactile connection to the world. His early years as a photographer were marked by a deep engagement with the everyday - the decaying streets of his native Lancashire in Northern England, people's fleeting expressions - the quiet poetry of ordinary landscapes and lives. These early images grounded him, offering a way to sift through chaos and find clarity. But the lure of storytelling through motion soon pulled him into filmmaking, where he carried over his photographer’s childlike curiosity into deeper narratives about people's lives and the ever changing world.

For Simon, photography and filmmaking are not separate disciplines but two sides of a singular vision - a lifelong dialogue between stillness and progress. Where his documentaries; unravel complex human stories with patience and depth, his images crystallise those narratives into single, haunting frames. 

Photography, for him, is a tool of discovery - a way to linger, to question, to peel back layers of the familiar until it reveals something profound. It’s the spark that ignites his filmmaking, where he takes those frozen insights and sets them in motion, exploring the why and how behind the what.

Simon created this website as a place to share those photographic works and moments where he found inspiration.

For his moving image film-work please see www.keypictures.org.