'Every relation with being is simultaneously a taking and a being taken, the hold is held' Maurice Merleau-Ponty
'The painter constructs, the photographer discloses'
Susan Sontag
About
Born and raised in Stockton on Tees, County Durham, Derek studied architecture at Kingston College of Art and University College London. Active in the student movement and the family squatting and co-operative housing movements in the 1970s, he became a registered architect and member of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1982 and completed an MSc in the History of Modern Architecture in 1985.
Derek has worked on social architecture, housing and public realm projects with different communities in inner-city neighbourhoods across London. He has developed award-winning community housing and urban design initiatives, bridging different disciplines and working with local authorities, housing associations, NGOs, and tenant and residents' and community groups . Appointed as a CABE Space enabler, he contributed to sector-wide design working groups, competition panels, and publications, featuring in the 2003 RIBA Journal edition ‘the people who really make architecture happen’.
Derek trained in person-centred counselling at the Institute of Education and in existential-phenomenological psychotherapy at the Philadelphia Association and Regent’s College. He accredited with the UK Council for Psychotherapy in 2012 and, in addition to working in private practice, has worked in a number of NHS funded psychotherapy and community counselling settings, including with local Mind services in the London boroughs. He has published essays on psychotherapy, phenomenology and the arts in the journals Existential Analysis, Hermeneutic Circular, and online Interalia Magazine.
Derek has over many years served in voluntary committee and trustee roles with a range of social action, mental health, and community arts organisations. He is currently vice-chair and a trustee of the Society for Existential Analysis and a management committee member of Oxford's Ultimate Picture Palace Community Cinema.
Derek has taken (and been taken by) photographs since being a youngster when given his first camera, a Brownie 127.
Articles
'Bringing Creative Attention: John Berger's and our faces, my heart, brief as photos', Hermeneutic Circular , October 2025 (pending).
John Berger regarded himself first and foremost as a storyteller and his book and our faces, my heart, brief as photos (first published in 1984) is a collection of stories meditating on time ('Once') and space ('Here'). And our faces is a short work, just 101 pages, that began, tellingly, as a series of love letters. It is a book to which I have returned many times...
'Flesh and the Angels', Hermeneutic Circular & Interalia Magazine, October/November 2020.
I am listening to John Coltrane ablaze with sound. Probing, relentless; beyond now his infamous 'sheets of sound'. In My Favourite Things, a signature tune to which he returned many times, recorded at Temple University on 11 November 1966. His soprano-horn breath searching and soaring. Soaring and then suddenly abandoning into shouts and strange chanting. A bursting of himself...
'The Unsettled Sense', Interalia Magazine, September 2022 (revised and edited); Existential Analysis, Journal of the Society for Existential Analysis, 24.1, 2013.
The eye is a sense organ and an affective organ. It receives and is moved. We see and we cry. This essay focuses primarily on the eye which sees and, in particular, on seeing as a presence to our experience of the world and others. It considers how there is the inherent unsettledness and instability in the phenomenology of seeing...how the phenomenal richness of seeing is, by its nature, in flux and susceptible to disequilibrium; how seeing is therefore also a steadying...
CONTACT
Please contact me with any inquiries at email:
info@derekbean.net
All Photographs © Derek Bean
