Answer is Colin Reiners, our Principal Lecturer in Media Production!

You see he lives in Woodhall Spa and Colin’s creative images of rural Lincolnshire life formed a photographic tour, which is being showcased throughout Italy. His exhibition ‘Gnome Thieves Attack Woodhall Spa’ started last year in Pontremoli, continued with a successful tour around Italy to Milan. Colin said: “The opening attracted people from as far away as Florence, and even a bemused visitor from Boston, Lincolnshire!” Unsurprisingly (this week when the exhibition comes to a close but has been on track in Milan’s railway!) missing gnomes and Colin’s images that captured Woodhall Spa’s community are still hitting headlines abroad and in Colin’s home patch. 

From Horncastle News: A missing garden gnome is raising the profile of a Lincolnshire village in a city over 1,000 miles away. 

The exhibition’s about images of ‘works in progress’ which explores photography to document social anthropology with visual irony – can objects and realities appear different when they’re photographed? Colin’s large print format offer an alternative, without titles or narrative, to the norm of viewing photos on a screen or in much smaller print. Colin’s photographic work ‘Ladri di Gnomi Attaccano Woodhall Spa’ is an observational snapshot of Woodhall Spa’s history from its aviation heritage to today’s socio-cultural village life in England. Colin said: “The Pontremolesi appreciated the messages in the images, seeing them as distinctively English but offering parallels to issues very current in modern day Italy.”  

In his creative career Colin studied at the Royal College of Art, he was Professor of Photography at Fleming College in Florence before undertaking academic posts. To find out more about Colin and to see his photographic work, do take a moment to view his site.