Entrepreneur Jonathan Straight gets snap happy with latest venture
ONE of Leeds and Yorkshire’s most prominent entrepreneurs is launching his latest venture and it’s as far from the business that he founded as you can get.
Jonathan Straight is the founder of waste recycling business Straight plc which was sold to Irish rival One51 in 2014 for nearly £11m.
Since the sale Jonathan has been involved in a number of charities, startups and social enterprises as well as being a regular on Made in Leeds TV, but photography is his real passion.
The eccentric entrepreneur will be showcasing his talents with an exhibition of street photography opening on Wednesday 14 December 2016 at the White Cloth Gallery in Leeds.
The exhibition is of black and white candid street photography. Jonathan said that he watched his late father develop photographs in their home bathroom which doubled as a darkroom and this is what inspired his passion in later life.
He said: “As an entrepreneur, I spent 21 years building up my small start-up into a public company. Supplying most of the waste and recycling containers in the UK amounting to some 50 million bins of one kind or another, I was fortunate to sell my interests in the business in 2014.
I grew up with photography. My late father was a keen photographer having his own home darkroom for a number of years. I spend many hours in there with him watching fascinated as he exposed photographic paper, dodging and burning and then developing, fixing and drying his prints.
“From a young age I was taking my own photographs too. I was given an old family Kodak Brownie probably around 7 years old. There was not too much skill in operating that but it was followed with a classic 35mm fixed lens camera for my 10th birthday. This required manual focus, aperture and exposure to be set and was a great way to learn the basics.
“My interest was reignited by finding a shoe box full of negatives after my mother passed away. These were mainly 120mm negatives my father had taken between the 1950s and the 1970s.
“Although there were also a lot of 35mm black and white negatives, colour negatives and colour slides, the older negatives held a particular allure to me. I had only seen these images as small, faded prints stuck into albums and they were grey and pale. Once scanned, these images showed amazing contrast and really came to life. I was keen to replicate this kind of feeling in my own work.
“Working with a fixed-focus, wide, prime lens means I have to get close the action and this is how I was brought up to work. It has now become something of a passion.
“Having an exhibition of my work is a great milestone in my journey as a photographer and I hope that this will be the first of many.”
All of the work will be available for sale with 10% of the proceeds going to The Leeds Fund, supporting community projects changing the lives of local people in Leeds.
Follow Jonathan on Instagram @straightpix.
