Category: Exhibitions

York author Ben Porter with a copy of his latest book, Kids Just Wanna Fly, pictured at York Theatre Royal

YORK author, poet, photographer, filmmaker, publisher and York Creatives founder Ben Porter charts the growing pains and gains of life between age ten and 20 in his new photobook.

Published by his own independent publishing house, Overt Books, Kids Just Wanna Fly takes “a leap into the unknown, captured on disposable cameras, Polaroids, cheap point & shoots and early iPhones”.

“It’s a tale youthful ambition, aspiration and the quest to craft an identity through the tumultuous years of young adulthood,” says Ben. “Unfolding mostly between 2003 and 2013, it’s a raw portrait of youth in the pre-Smartphone era and life growing up in post-industrial northern England.

“The book asks you to consider how much of your ten-year-old self was left in you at 20? How the youthful energy of your teen years shaped the person you became, perhaps in spite of where society tried to direct it.

“It challenges you to think about the value of first-time experiences, of hazy memories that blend fact with fiction, and the advice you ultimately decide to pass on to the next generation.”

Launched at Patch@Bonding Warehouse as part of the Aesthetica Fringe at the 2025 Aesthetica Short Film Festival, Kids Just Wanna Fly complements 73 of Porter’s youthful photographs with “heartfelt” short stories and poems by eight contributing authors.

Seven hail from York: Kitty Greenbrown’s Stand And Face The Wind; Kathryn Tann’s The Sky Inside A Puddle; Atlas Rook’s Four Seconds; Luke Downing’s Snapshots; Bram Jarman’s Stood On Your Own Two Feet; Angel Jones’s Concerto and Jay Ventress’s Canvases, joined by Sheffield writer Oliver Manning’s When I Grow Up.

“Instead of doing the writing myself this time, I wanted to broaden it out to other people’s experiences, to go with my ‘roughly chronological’ photos (more in terms of telling the story, rather than when they were taken,” says Ben.  

“Giving them a very loose brief to reflect on how much of their ten-year-old self was still there when they were 20, I gave them a set of images to respond to. Their contributions have beautifully brought to life the many emotions of young adulthood.”

Thanking everyone featured in his photographs for “contributing towards making my journey through life an utter thrill”, he says:  “I took the images on disposable cameras, cheap consumer digitals and first-generation iPhones, before modern camera technology matured. Intimate and imperfect, they embody the raw possibility of a time when everything felt wide open.

Out of the blue: here comes Ben Porter’s book, Kids Just Wanna Fly

“Every picture was carefully selected because it represents an important part of the story – one of a child developing into adulthood, doing their best to navigate their own path in the face of so many conflicting directions,” he says.

Ben’s preface could not better express the vision and mission of a book “charged with youthful movement, capturing the exuberance, confusion and hopefulness of adolescence”. “We are reincarnated many times throughout our teenage years,” he writes. “We try on personas like outfits, switching between social circles that each have different cultures and expectations.

“We have no idea what the world wants from us, nor what we can reasonably offer. Our hopes of who we want to become hang delicately, forever at risk of being crushed before we grow the confidence to stand by them.

“We receive conflicting advice from elders, who we begin to realise have just as many questions as we do, and no convincing answers. All we can do is jump, and hope we fly, for a little while.”

Kids Just Wanna Fly follows Porter’s earlier photobook, Wanderings & Wonderings, his November 2024 exploration of the relationship between humans and nature that was marked by a meditative stillness that contrasts with the new book’s youthful exuberance.

“I’ve been a photographer all my life, but with no exhibitions at that point, but I really enjoyed doing that book, where I picked photos from a folder called ‘Nature, containing 300-400 from over 100,000 pictures I’d taken, spread 200 on the floor, then came up with the theme of our interaction with nature,” says Ben, whose book combined images with his poetic ‘reflections and provocations”.

Wanderings & Wonderings’ release was accompanied by his debut exhibition at Angel on the Green, in Bishopthorpe Road, where Ben’s photos were on show from November 2024 to March 2025.

“When I thought, ‘what should I do next?’, I went through my hard drives, going back to 2003, and just grabbed stuff off there, anything that caught my interest or images that I didn’t think I could capture again, with a theme of memory.

“Looking back, I was pushing boundaries as a child in Sheffield, annoying my parents, trying to see what I could get away with, like spending our time climbing old industrial Sheffield buildings..

“We always took pictures on family holidays, and I really got the bug for photography when watching skateboarding videos. I’d go skateboarding, take the camera with me, do bad videos and then rather better photographs – and those images are now more interesting than they were back then.”

Two photographs from Ben Porter’s stock of images from 2003 to 2013 for Kids Just Wanna Fly

Explaining the choice of book title, Ben says: “The flight image kept coming up. I thought, ‘why was that’, but then I looked back at how you know what you want to be at ten, but at 20, we’re not so sure, when others might have influenced you. It’s about aspiration. At ten you want to project into the future, and it doesn’t come into your head that you might not succeed.

“It’s that lack of fear, and Kids Just Wanna Fly is such a wonderful metaphor for kids to  keep on trying…until parents or teachers convince them not to do so.” How apt that Ben should sign his book for CharlesHutchPress with the message: “It’s never too late to keep trying to fly.”

Ben grew up as the eldest of five brothers, sons of the Right Reverent Matthew Porter. “Our father was the vicar of a small parish church and he was the reason we moved to York from Sheffield in 2008 when he took over as vicar of St Michael le Belfrey,” says Ben. “He’s now the Bishop of Bolton, one of three Bishops for Manchester, looking after Bolton and Salford.

“My dad was working a lot, and my mum had her hands full looking after the children. I remember being frustrated that my parents wouldn’t let me go further than ten minutes from the house until secondary school at Birkdale. That required two bus rides, which took an hour, or 90 minutes to walk, and if it wasn’t raining, I would walk back home.

“From the age of 12-13, I thought of myself as adult, as the leader, with my youngest brother, David, being 11 years younger than me. I’d find that we would sit around not making decisions unless I did, so often I’d make a decision without adults around, but at that age you don’t know what the best option is, so often you make terrible decisions and someone gets hurt.”

Ben’s folder of photographic images from his passage through teenage days was once called “Rebelliousness”. “That was the underlying theme, and the first title I came up with for the book was ‘Once We Were Beautiful’, but some people said that sounded too sad, and it didn’t quite capture what I wanted to get across, whereas Kids Just Wanna Fly does,” says Ben.

“The beauty of being young is trying to do something you might not able to do, and what we do as photographers is pick the ones that resonate the most. They tend to be the ones that are photogenic, which is also why I changed the title as I didn’t want it to be shallow.”

Kids Just Wanna Fly, by Ben Porter, is published by Overt Books at £22 in hardback, £14 in paperback, available from overtbooks.com.

More photographs from Ben Porter’s Kids Just Wanna Fly

Ben Porter on York Creatives

“THE precursor was Plastic Fortune, which we started in 2014 to showcase creativity and alternative culture in York,” says Ben. “In 2016 I renamed it as York Creatives and became managing director and chair. My vision was to assemble 50 people but it grew to 300 – it was at the time when the Arts Barge was being slagged of as a ‘vanity project’.

“People had said, ‘where do you get funding for York Creatives?’, when there was already York Professionals for professionals in the city, but I just thought, ‘I’ll start York Creatives anyway’.”

Founder Ben has stepped back, now that he has a six-month-old son, Jacob. “I can still be involved in the strategy of the group, but now Sarah Williams in the managing director and John Rose-Adams is the chair, ” he says.

York Creatives is a free-to-join network that provides an online forum for arts conversations and sends out a monthly newsletter of upcoming arts events to 3,500 people, with details of upcoming opportunities.

In-person events include Creative Drinks on the first Friday of each month at Patch@Bonding Warehouse (having been held previously at Spark:York, with the capacity now doubling from 50 to 100).

Pop-up events for different arts sectors are held too. Board members cover the fields of art, design, poetry, performance, film, gaming, photography, creative writing and literature. “They’re all encouraged to organise events for their sub-sectors,” says Ben.

The cover artwork for Benjamin Porter’s book, York’s Creative Spaces

“I see York Creatives as a hub for finding out what’s going on in the city, to sign-post other things that are going on and to link people new to the city with what’s happening.

“There’s also an option to become a York Creatives supporter for £2.50 a month, giving access to events, or otherwise entry to events costs £5. A Pro option costs £6.25 a month with a bunch of other benefits.”

Ben Porter on Overt Books

BEN Porter set up the independent York publishing house Overt Books to publish artist books.

“I founded it as the next step in the journey, to help local creatives put their ideas to the page in the form of beautiful yet affordable artist books,” he says.

Already Overt Books has released Ben’s first book, York’s Creative Spaces, a collection of photographs and interviews profiling the studios, workshops, galleries, creative offices and independent venues of York.

“This book documents the quirky, historic, repurposed spaces York’s creative community inhabits and creates work from,” says Ben.

York floral artist Lesley Birch, whose book Flower Power is published by Overt Books. Picture: Esme Mai Photography

Next came Ben’s Wanderings & Wonderings and, in 2025, York floral artist Lesley Birch’s Flower Power, whose release is accompanied by an exhibition at Pyramid Gallery, Stonegate, that will run until mid-January.

“In 2026, we’ll be looking to publish works by a small number of local artists, which we hope to build upon each year. If you’ve got an idea for an artist book that you would like to discuss, contact me via hi@overtbooks.com. If you want to turn your work into a picture publication, I’d love you to get in touch.”

Coming next will be Katie Lou McCabe’s book of analogue photography, A Darkroom Exploration Of Ancient Egypt And The Quantum Void. “It’s a mixture of reflections on how she got into analogue photography, and the things she thinks about when processing in her darkroom on the North York Moors,” says Ben.

“She has linked together an Ancient Egypt creation myth about light and the sun with developments in quantum physics, discovering that if you keep breaking particles down, inside there is light, so as a photographer it’s fascinating to her that everything is made up of light.”

Did you know?

BEN Porter manages co-working office space for businesses in six rooms in premises next to the Golden Fleece, in Pavement, York.

Did you know too?

IN 2010, Ben Porter formed the band Likely Lads. “We were very much influenced by the indie bands of the time, such as Arctic Monkeys and The Libertines,” he says. “That band folded in late-2014, and we became The Blue Dawns. Our last album came out three years ago,” he says.