Who am I?

My name is Mark Varley, pay close attention to what I say because I choose my words carefully and I never repeat myself.

I’m a photographer, and a photographic artist, and several other things too. I was born in the far North of England and grew up in the North East of England, surrounded by open countryside thats where I spent most of my time. I joined the army right after school and left with ‘disabilities’ a few years later, these primarily affect my physical mobility so I decided a wise future would be to get a degree in computing and spend the rest of my life sitting at a computer screen.

The appeal of that wore thin after a few months study so I quit, picked up my camera and never looked back. Ironically, as a primarily digital photographer, I spend most of my time looking at a computer screen.

What do I do?

Most of my work is as a photographer, thats my ‘profession’, I long since decided that I wanted to fill my life with beautiful things, life is too short to fill it with the mundane, boring, unpleasant and horrific, so my photography concentrates on ‘the beautiful’, usually in interesting and unusual ways.
My photographic subjects cover everything from Wildlife, Landscapes & Cityscapes to People, people are my favourate, especially the classic fine-art nude.

I will photograph anything, anywhere as long as 1) it is or can be made ‘interesting’, ‘different’ or ‘unusual’.
& 2) I’m getting paid.

I am also quite well known for my bondage and bondage photography, more about that is on another website of mine Beautiful Bondage .net, in brief I see rope bondage as another creative artistic process within itself.

Why do I do it?

I do what I do because I’ve had enough ugliness in my life and seen enough ugliness in the world so I firstly don’t want any more in my life and secondly don’t want to be a source of any in anyone elses life, instead I want to fill my life and consequently others with beautiful and interesting things. This is the single greatest driving force behind what I do.

How did I get to here?

I guess it all started when I was at school (Mrs Todd, this means you!), I was always interested in art but could never find anything I was good at, in my final year my art teacher gave me some film, so I took my camera out and pointed it at stuff, and they came out ok! but I didn’t do much more after school, until I left the army, I bought an old Zenit SLR (old brick of a thing, made in russia out of old tractor parts), I was taking photos of everything that moved and most things that didn’t, and have been doing that pretty much ever since.

I have always been a fan of the fine-art photographs, especially the fine-art nudes and figure, I was part of a newsgroup (abpn-a) online for years and we’d all hunt around for the highest of quality art nudes we could find, I was continually weakened by the sheer beauty of such work. Then I decided to have a go myself, with much encouragement from the aforementioned community. That was it, I found something I was really good at, not just a bit good, really good. This is now 90% of my photography and I consider myself to be a ‘fine-arts photographer’ primarily of nudes.