Getting in contact with Craig Oldham

Craig is someone who I came across when I found out about his book In Loving Memory of Work which is a visual record of the coal pit strikes that took place in 1984-85. His work immediately struck me because of the amount of passion and effort that's been put into every aspect of this book. The strikes and the events that followed is something very personal to him, considering that his dad was himself a coal miner who lost his job to the closure of the pits, which ultimately led to some tough times that followed.

I could instantly tell that he was passionate about this through his work but also through his tone of voice during his talks. This I would say is partly due to the amount he swears, which is entirely appropriate given the context of his talks.

During his talk for Nicer Tuesdays, he makes a big point about how design shouldn't be for the sake of design, instead it should have a purpose, have a meaning, it should be communicating something. His strong opinions on this are evident through his work as his work has a clear obvious point he's trying to communicate. This is why I'm so interested to find out more about him and his views towards design, because I myself, like to think that I design for a reason.

I wrote up a letter explaining my reason for wanting to chat with him, I think that a letter is much more personal to the recipient but also because back in 2012 Craig did The Hand Written Letter Project which was based around how personal a letter can be in this day and age when our inboxes are filled with spam, junk mail. I think that sending a letter is definitely a much more personal form of communication, it requires a lot more effort to hand write a letter, buy a stamp and post it off than to send a quick email.