Stranger days
On 1 January 2017, just after midnight, a slightly merry John Mannell raised his Olympus camera to his eye and took a portrait of his friend Olly and a woman they’d just met (below). An innocuous act repeated by millions across the country celebrating new year. For John, that fraction of a second marked the end of a long and often harrowing chapter in his life and the beginnings of a new and more positive one. It was the first picture for his project, portrait_per_ day (PPD). That year, 364 portraits followed on Instagram, and around another 1,300 since.
Photography had been a passion in John’s life from his early teens when he enrolled on a night course, transfixed by developing black & white prints in the darkroom. An overly shy and anxious kid, it gave him a welcome refuge. In his early 20s,
