VALDA BAILEY
Two images made on Hikkaduwa beach, Sri Lanka, in January 2017.
When did you first get bitten by the photography bug? I started when I was 14, but I was more interested in painting at that time. I briefly went to art school in London in the mid-1970s at the age of 16, where I was surrounded by drugs, cheesecloth and joss sticks. Basically I bailed out after a couple of terms. I just wasn’t mature enough to deal with it. However, I continued to paint when I returned home.
In 2006, after I bought a digital camera for taking holiday snaps, a friend suggested I should go on Flickr. He said it was a great place to learn about things. So I joined up, learned an awful lot and became engrossed in photography.
What kind of work did you do at that stage?
After I got to grips with learning the basics and trying to find a vision, for want of a better word, I wanted to find a way of
