Taste of street life

Having started out as a photographer in a morgue, Australian Liam Nicholls soon realised that street photography - rather than dead people - was his passion.

So, armed with an old twin lens medium-format camera, he has spent the past 15 years capturing his experiences in Warsaw, Belfast, London and his home city of Melbourne.

He is now picture editor of the Antipodean travellers' bible, TNT Magazine, and in his first exhibition, showcases the best of his pictures.

Many include his quirky observances as a newcomer to London, such as a rainy picture of Hammersmith's Charing Cross Hospital, which is - ironically - taken from inside a neighbouring graveyard.

In his images of people, Nicholls prefers his subjects looking away from him - as with his eery selfportrait, in which an effigy of the Virgin Mary watches over him.

'I'm attracted to photos of people who are thinking of some place else,' he says. 'As soon as a person is looking away from the camera it creates a mood that the audience can then interpret for themselves.'

When he does let his subjects gaze into the lens - as with the images of a girl dancing free on the streets of Belfast, or Melbourne rockers The Powder Monkeys caught post-gig - what may be lost in intrigue is more than made up for in intensity.

Until Friday (April 30), 9am to 7pm, Mon to Fri, New Zealand House, 80 Haymarket SW1, free.