John "Johnnie" Shand Kydd (born 2 May 1959) is the youngest son of Peter Shand Kydd

Peter Shand Kydd

Peter Shand Kydd was the former stepfather of Diana, Princess of Wales and an heir to the wallpaper fortune built by his father Norman Shand Kydd. He was half-brother to the former champion amateur jockey William Shand Kydd....

 and Janet Munro Kerr. He is stepbrother to Diana, Princess of Wales

Diana, Princess of Wales

Diana, Princess of Wales was the first wife of Charles, Prince of Wales, whom she married on 29 July 1981, and an international charity and fundraising figure, as well as a preeminent celebrity of the late 20th century...

. He is an internationally exhibited photographer; certain of his portraits were once exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery.

Life and work

Shand Kydd studied Art (and English) at university, but said that, by then, he had done enough painting to know that he did not want to pursue it, "There's so much crap art around and what's the point of being a mediocre artist?"

After working at a Bond Street

Bond Street

Bond Street is a major shopping street in the West End of London that runs north-south through Mayfair between Oxford Street and Piccadilly. It has been a fashionable shopping street since the 18th century and is currently the home of many high price fashion shops...

 art gallery selling 19th Century paintings for a number of years Shand Kydd began taking photographs of his artist friends and those in his social sphere, using an Instamatic

Instamatic

The Instamatic was a series of inexpensive, easy-to-load 126 and 110 cameras made by Kodak beginning in 1963. The Instamatic was immensely successful, introducing a generation to low-cost photography and spawning numerous imitators....

 camera

Camera

A camera is a device that records and stores images. These images may be still photographs or moving images such as videos or movies. The term camera comes from the camera obscura , an early mechanism for projecting images...

.

As a participant rather than solely an observer he captured the community of the Young British Artists

Young British Artists

Young British Artists or YBAs is the name given to a loose group of visual artists who first began to exhibit together in London, in 1988...

 before they became household names. As an emerging photographer, Shand Kydd served as the silent chronicler of the movement by capturing his friends, including Tracey Emin

Tracey Emin

Tracey Karima Emin RA is a British artist of English and Turkish Cypriot origin. She is part of the group known as Britartists or YBAs ....

 and Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst

Damien Steven Hirst is an English artist, entrepreneur and art collector. He is the most prominent member of the group known as the Young British Artists , who dominated the art scene in Britain during the 1990s. He is internationally renowned, and is reportedly Britain's richest living artist,...

, on film. That work was soon collected into the book Spit Fire. The collection was featured in the Sensation show at the Royal Academy

Royal Academy

The Royal Academy of Arts is an art institution based in Burlington House on Piccadilly, London. The Royal Academy of Arts has a unique position in being an independent, privately funded institution led by eminent artists and architects whose purpose is to promote the creation, enjoyment and...

 in 1997. From this portfolio the National Portrait Gallery acquired 42 prints.

His second book, Crash, documented the progress of his friends. About 200 exposures in strict black-and-white capture art-society luminaries like Gilbert & George, Sam Taylor-Wood

Sam Taylor-Wood

Samantha "Sam" Taylor-Wood OBE , born Samantha Taylor, is an English filmmaker, photographer, and visual artist. Her directorial feature film debut came in 2009 with Nowhere Boy, a film based on the childhood experiences of The Beatles songwriter and singer John Lennon...

, Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin

Nancy "Nan" Goldin is an American photographer.-Life and work:Goldin was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in the Boston, Massachusetts suburb of Lexington, to middle class Jewish parents whose ideas, moderately liberal and progressive, were put to the test when on April 12, 1965 their eldest...

, Richard Prince

Richard Prince

Richard Prince is an American painter and photographer. Prince began appropriating photographs in 1975...

, Juergen Teller

Juergen Teller

Juergen Teller is an artist and fashion photographer.-Life and career:Teller studied at the Bayerische Staatslehranstalt für Photographie in Munich, Germany...

, Maurizio Cattelan

Maurizio Cattelan

Maurizio Cattelan is an Italian artist based in New York. He is known for his satirical sculptures, particularly La Nona Ora , depicting the Pope John Paul II struck down by a meteorite....

 and Tracey Emin

Tracey Emin

Tracey Karima Emin RA is a British artist of English and Turkish Cypriot origin. She is part of the group known as Britartists or YBAs ....

.

His most recent publication and photographic exhibition, Siren City, is the result of eight years of photographic research in Naples

Naples

Naples is a city in Southern Italy, situated on the country's west coast by the Gulf of Naples. Lying between two notable volcanic regions, Mount Vesuvius and the Phlegraean Fields, it is the capital of the region of Campania and of the province of Naples...

, a place defined by Shand Kidd as one of the most radical cities in Europe.

Publications

• Spit Fire: Photographs from the Art World, Thames & Hudson, London, 1996/97
• Crash, Damiani, 2006
• Siren City, Other Criteria, London, 2009