Steve Pyke

Pyke married photographer Nic Kaczorowski at St. Paul's Cathedral, London, in June 2014. They live and work in New Orleans, Louisiana with their two rhodesian ridgebacks Beauregard and Kingston.

Pyke was appointed an MBE in the 2004 New Year Honours list for his services to the Arts. In 2006 he was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society. He became staff photographer at The New Yorker in 2004 and lives in New York City.

It was during an early project on film directors that Pyke established his trademark portrait style, chancing on the little close-up lenses, that when placed on his Rolleiflex camera, allowed him to make incisive, direct images within the square 6x6cm negative. The first picture made in this way, of the film director Sam Fuller in 1983, was taken the same afternoon as Pyke found the Rolleinars in an Edinburgh camera shop.

Pyke's early work was sold to magazines and the music press, and exhibited from 1982. It helped to define the emergent visual signature of the iconic 1980s magazine, The Face. His first cover subject was John Lydon, and Pyke's predilection for distinctive, graphically adventurous portraiture was immediately evident. He sought to develop his style by joining the Film Centre Stream course at the London College of Printing in 1982, though he was an unconventional student, working as much on his own projects as college assignments. His independent mind attracted the film director Peter Greenaway for whom Pyke created photographic works used in his films, stills and the poster shots for A Zed and Two Noughts, The Belly of an Architect, Drowning by Numbers and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover. More recently his work featured prominently in Mike Nichols' movie Closer.

Born in Leicester, Pyke left school at 16 to work in the local textile industry as a factory mechanic. He became involved in the turbulent music scene of the late 1970s, a move which led him into his first experiments in photography. Pyke moved to London in 1978. He became a singer in a number of bands and was involved with establishing a record label and fanzines. During an extended motorcycle tour of the USA in 1976, he assembled a collection of Instamatic pictures. On his return he Xeroxed and coloured them and, fascinated by the results, purchased a Rolleiflex camera. By 1980 he had abandoned rock music for the visual arts.

Steve Pyke MBE (born 1957) is a British photographer living in New Orleans, Louisiana. From 1981 to 1984, he worked for diverse publications including The Face and NME. Pyke was a staff photographer at The New Yorker from 2004 through 2010. He currently lives and works in New Orleans, Louisiana.