A Photo Story: While I'm Working
Ten years of images that the client never saw. Ben Lumley finally gave them somewhere to live.
Every working photographer knows the feeling. You are on assignment. You have a brief. You know exactly what the client needs and you are delivering it. And then something happens in the corner of your eye that has nothing to do with the assignment and everything to do with why you became a photographer in the first place. You raise the camera. You get the shot. And then you put it in a folder where it will probably never be seen by anyone.
Ben Lumley has been collecting those moments for ten years.
Lumley is a sports photographer based in the UK who works across American Football, triathlon, rugby, netball, and a range of other disciplines. His clients take him around the world. He has photographed events across the Far East and Europe as well as the full calendar of UK sport. He is known in his field for black and white sports photography, a distinctive approach in a genre that typically favors color and action. Over the last few years his work has moved increasingly toward a documentary style of capturing sport rather than simply shooting match action as it unfolds.
But Photos While I'm Working is something different from all of that. It is what was happening while the official work was being done.
The images that did not fit
The premise of the series is straightforward and immediately recognizable to any photographer who has worked to a brief. While shooting for clients Lumley is always looking. That does not stop when the briefed moment is over or when the client does not need what he is seeing. A composition that catches his eye while travelling to an event. A scene setter that captures the atmosphere of a venue in a way the client has not asked for. A fraction of a second moment on the periphery of the main action that belongs to nobody's brief and to the photographer entirely.
These images are not failures or offcuts. They simply live outside the transaction between photographer and client. They have no commercial home. For most photographers they gather dust on a hard drive until a format change makes them inaccessible and eventually they disappear entirely.
Lumley decided they deserved better than that.
Photos While I'm Working is where those images go. A series with no brief, no client, no commercial purpose, and no rules beyond the photographer's own sense of what belongs. A decade of accumulated personal seeing finally given a place to exist.
Why black and white
The choice is not incidental. Lumley has shot black and white sports photography long enough that it has become part of how he is known professionally. At the start of 2026 he made a conscious decision to shoot all his personal work in monochrome as well. The series reflects that commitment.
Black and white, he says simply, is his favourite. There is no more complicated reason than that and none is needed. The images in the series carry a quality that feels different from assignment work precisely because they were made for nobody but the photographer. The monochrome treatment reinforces that. These are not images designed to communicate sports results or capture decisive action for editorial use. They are personal documents made by someone who could not stop looking even when the job was technically finished.
Looking at the images you can feel that quality. A street scene shot from inside a moving vehicle, all converging lines and architectural geometry. A lone figure silhouetted against a blast of forest light. A performer caught mid gesture under dramatic stage illumination. Stadium seats labeled Away Team, repeated across the frame in a quietly humorous pattern. A scoreboard standing against a grey sky with the logic of a cricket match laid out in fading numbers. None of these are sports photographs in any conventional sense. All of them were made by someone at a sporting event who could not help seeing something worth capturing in the spaces between the action.
The geography of the series
The images come from everywhere and nowhere specific. The Far East. Europe. Venues and transit routes across the UK. Ten years of travel compressed into a single ongoing archive. Lumley does not organize the series by location or date. The images are unified not by geography but by the circumstance of their making. All of them are from the time while he was working. All of them are what he saw that the client did not need.
That lack of geographical specificity is part of what gives the series its particular character. You are not looking at a portrait of a place. You are looking at a portrait of a way of seeing. The locations shift but the eye remains consistent. The same attention to geometry, to light, to the human figure in space, to the quiet details that most people at a sporting event walk straight past, is present across the whole body of work regardless of where it was made.
What Ben's series teaches us
There is something worth sitting with here that goes beyond the photographs themselves.
Most photographers wait for the right conditions to make personal work. The right trip. The right project. The right block of time set aside specifically for making images that matter to them. That time rarely arrives with the clarity and freedom they imagined and in the meantime the personal work does not get made.
Ben's approach is different and more honest. He did not create a separate space for personal work. He found it inside the work he was already doing. The personal work was always there happening in the margins of the assignment. He just decided to take it seriously.
The practical lesson is straightforward. You do not need a dedicated project or a clear brief or a trip planned specifically around photography to make work that is genuinely yours. You need to keep looking even when the looking is not required. To raise the camera when something catches your eye even if it has nothing to do with why you are there. To treat the images that belong to nobody's brief as seriously as the ones that do.
The second lesson is about the archive. Every photographer has a hard drive full of images that never went anywhere. Most of those images stay there indefinitely, unseen, slowly becoming inaccessible as formats change and drives age. Ben's series is an argument for going back in. For looking at what has been accumulating in the margins of your working life and asking whether there is a body of work in there that deserves to exist in the world.
There probably is. There almost certainly is.
The brief does not define what is worth making. It only defines what the client needs. Everything else belongs to you.
You can check out more of Bens work on foto @benlumleyphoto
Ben Lumley is a sports photographer based in the UK whose work takes him across the world covering American Football, triathlon, rugby, netball, and a range of other disciplines. Known for his black and white approach to sports photography and an increasingly documentary sensibility, he has been building the Photos While I'm Working archive for a decade. The series is ongoing. Follow his work on Foto for updates as it grows.
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A Beginners Guide To Black And White Photography