Dennis is ready to capture all the fun of Festival of Chichester

Dennis will be getting to as many events as he can to document them, so creating an instant legacy from the 2013 festival.

Dennis attended the first public meeting last autumn which was held to gauge the level of public interest in a successor festival to the defunct Chichester Festivities.

He has been a keen supporter of the new Festival of Chichester (June 15-July 14) ever since – and now will be ensuring that it is properly documented in photographic form.

Dennis moved to Chichester last October from Hull where he had worked as a photographer on a number of important projects: “My first big arts project was Larkin With Toads, for the 25th anniversary of (poet Philip) Larkin’s death. We had a fibre-glass animals trail. We had toads, and I was the photographer for the project – hand-painted toads available throughout the city.”

Dennis also travelled to Morocco for a project on stray cats: “I have got three cats of my own, and I wanted to see their stray cousins. I went to Essaouira, and I traipsed around there for days. That was 2011, and that miraculously turned into my own first solo exhibition of my own work. That was called Take Me To The Kittens! in Hull in 2012. It was 12 photos in a small community gallery space with quite a limited audience.”

But somehow it took off, with interest from Leica Camera and Your Cat magazine: “This all led to it being catapulted into the society pages of Yorkshire Life and becoming a bit of a must-see event.”

For Festival of Chichester, Dennis will be turning his lens on the humans – but will be doing so discreetly. The key, as he says, is to use a small camera.

As he says, it’s quite hard for a photographer not to stand out: “Photographers are naturally quite nerdy! If you turn up with a big bag and loads of lenses, then you are the elephant in the room that no one wants to be around. I prefer to use a little camera, a match-box size.

“I am also assembling a group of volunteers that will cover some of the events at that festival. We have got members of the Chichester Photography Corner that I run, that meets at the Old Cross pub on the last Tuesday of every month at 7.30pm. I am drawing in people that want to give event photography a go and also a couple of photography students and their friends from Chichester College.”

You can contact Dennis at [email protected].