Neal McQueen picked up photography again end of his 30´s in the last year of a 25 year underground career as a musician. As a teenager he experimented for some years with all kinds of art forms, including analog b&w photography, and decided that music was the one. As a singer, songwriter, producer and dj he worked and played under more than a dozen aliases, producing a wide range of music from all sorts of electronic breakbeats up to rock and singer/songwriter music. He picked up photography again after buying a used Nikon f401 and within a year he made the full switch to capturing moments with light instead of sound. Almost all he needed to know about photography he already learned as a musician: timing, composition, style and adding some vibe to it. The technical part he practiced over and over again for 3 years by shooting and processing at least one film a day. His love is clearly the old school b&w photography, analog as well as digital. During the first 5 years he focused on portrait, street, event, concert and erotic art photography but after a brief time as the last assistant of Daniel Josefsohn between 2014 and 2015 he sensed that the year 2015 would be transformational for the EU, so he started to dedicate his time and efforts almost exclusively to journalistic/activist works. Producing long term non-profit and open to the public online documentations all over Europa regarding human rights, the refugee crisis, the political crisis of Europa, the global climate emergency and the dangers from the far right. In between he finds some time to work with artists, musician and writers from different backgrounds like Trentemøller, Ai Weiwei and Robert Menasse. He was also involved in the DiEM25 movement and worked closely with Yanis Varoufakis during his campaign for the European election campaign tour 2019 in Germany and Greece. Works from Neal McQueen have been published in Leica Fotografie International Online Magazin, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Haaretz, Tagesspiegel,  New Internationalist and many other publications. Two of his longterm documentations have been exhibited in a solo exhibitions in Berlin by Hilaneh von Kories, also he had two solo exhibitions in Hamburg before. He toke part in several group exhibitions in Hamburg, Berlin, Munich, Bern, Locarno, Amsterdam. Since late summer 2019 Johnny de Mol has an ongoing live stage show in the Netherlands explaining and performing how he got involved 2015 as an activist in refugee work on Lesbos/Greece while in the background the photos of Neal McQueen from that time on the island are shown on the big screen. Johnny and Neal worked together during that time.  

Neal McQueen refuses to work for large corporations and other entities, people and parties who put harm to the environment, abuses workers and animal rights as well as media corporations with a toxic output like Springer, Bertelsmann or Murdoch. Ethics over profit is always a fixed guideline for him.