Years ago, I came across a tattered little book entitled 'Wayside Snapshots' in a second-hand bookshop. Looking through it, I was quite taken by the style and approach of some of the photographs. It was by a photographer I'd never heard of - Hugo van Wadenoyen. I shelved it with my other photobook curiosities and forgot about it for a while.

Some years later, whilst researching Raymond Moore for this website, I discovered that one of the people that he cited as an influence on his photography was none other than the very same Hugo van Wadenoyen. This prompted me to look at his book afresh and to try and discover something about the man behind it. Well, there was precious little on the web that I could find, and certainly no in-depth appraisal of his work and contribution to British photography.

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society in 1918 at the age of 26; he was to  become a Founder Fellow of the Institute of British Photographers and lived most of his life in Cheltenham. He listed his interests as photography, making gadgets and house decorating....