About Eric

Eric Hayes, London 1969

ERIC HAYES has been a photojournalist since he was a teenager in western Canada's Okanagan Valley, shooting pictures for the local newspaper in Kelowna, British Columbia. He studied at the well-known Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, California, until his desire to see the world got the better of him and he spent the next two years travelling, first to India, then to England, where he started to build his portfolio with performance shots of rock stars such as The Who, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, and the Rolling Stones. Highlights from that period included touring with Joe Cocker and the Grease Band, two nights in Olympic Studios with the Stones, the 1969 Isle of Wight Festival, and the Stones' Hyde Park concert.

After returning to western Canada and homesteading for a while, Eric moved east to Toronto to build a photojournalism career that took him from the Toronto Star to the covers of many Canadian magazines.

A move to Nova Scotia in the early 1980s allowed him to balance his lifestyle with continuing magazine work, including regional and national magazines such as Harrowsmith, Equinox, Maclean's, Canadian Living, Canadian Business, Atlantic Insight, and many others.

Eric has recently parlayed his former photojournalism career into the art forum. Using both the traditional black and white darkroom as well as digital print processes, he has developed a series of rock & roll concert shots from the late sixties, a continuing series of evocative portraits of children and teens, plus various colour travel images.

Eric, The British Virgin Islands, 2005