“At a time when media coverage of our city has been rather mixed, is a privilege to show the true nature of Birmingham \u2013 an inclusive and vibrant city with a surprise around every corner,” he said. <\/p>\n
He has been documenting the city since his first book, Positively Birmingham, was published in 1994. <\/p>\n
“There was no book of the modern city that you could buy, so I took off with my camera to take pictures,” he explained. <\/p>\n
“I took it to a London publisher, and he said ‘there’s a reason there is no coffee table book about Birmingham – it wouldn’t sell'”.<\/p>\n
“My wife and I literally remortgaged our house, in order to publish it,” he added. <\/p>\n
“We saved up and borrowed \u00a320,000 and the city got behind me, the Lord Mayor gave me a civic reception at the council house and we sold out 5,000 copies in nine months.”<\/p>\n
A donation is made to Birmingham homelessness charity Sifa Fireside, with books so far raising \u00a342,000, he said. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“At a time when media coverage of our city has been rather mixed, is a privilege to show…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":277052,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[6225,6485,6486,1120,96,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-277051","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-design","12":"tag-entertainment","13":"tag-uk","14":"tag-united-kingdom","15":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277051","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=277051"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277051\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/277052"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=277051"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=277051"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=277051"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}