“If you know to do what I do you can make anyone forget why they’re there, and when you reach that moment all kinds of secrets reveal themselves."

Photographer Chris Floyd rose to prominence during the heights of Britpop and has since become one of the most in-demand portrait photographers in the world. Not Just Pictures, published by Reel Art Press in October 2022, is the first monograph dedicated to his 30-year career. A visual memoir, Chris’s selected career highlights are accompanied by his incisive, insightful recollections, first-hand accounts of, in his words, ‘unique encounters on the confrontation and collaboration line’.

Paul McCartney, Yoko Ono, David Bowie, Bill Murray, Vivienne Westwood, David Hockney, Ian McEwan, Margaret Drabble, Oasis, Robert De Niro, Iggy Pop, David Attenborough, Imelda Marcos, Debbie Harry, Christopher Reeve, David Cameron and Marcus Rashford are a fraction of the subjects that have engaged with Chris and his camera over the last 30 years.

Both meticulous and spontaneous, Chris’s wit and vulnerability is present in every anecdote. Not Just Pictures is all about stories: from getting his first camera, to getting mugged, to believing one of his heroes would only want to buy the rights to an image because “he disliked it enough to want it removed from the public domain”.

As the world seeks to sanitise its visual history, in the age of Google’s Magic Eraser, Chris Floyd’s Not Just Pictures is a permanent reminder of what photography is really about.