Shooting the outsiders: New Age travellers are tired of being portrayed as anti-social. One photographer wants to end the witch hunt. Jane Richards reports

In the July issue of Country Living, the writer A N Wilson admitted to wishing he had spent a year or two of his younger days living like a New Age traveller. He referred to the hysterical overreaction of the British public to this new breed of traveller (leading an alternative gypsy lifestyle), saying 'They do not merely disturb the sleep of a few families in the West Country, they disturb our bourgeois selfishness and greed, (and yet) their way of life is, in many ways, better than the boring, restrictive urban existence of the wage slave or the person in the dole queue.'

Wilson's point of view is reflected in John Warburton's exhibition of photographs, 'Travellers', at Bristol's Watershed. Both offer a refreshing commentary on the so-called 'folk devil' of British society, highlighting their plight as an unjustly persecuted people. And it's a timely rejoinder: the Public Order Act is under review in the House of Commons while the controversial Criminal Justice Bill is currently being considered.

John Warburton's vibrantly colourful prints, taken over a two-year period, present a winning argument. He juxtaposes images of a caring, environmentally-friendly and family-oriented people, with evidence of antagonism such as caravans being set on fire.

Warburton, who recently graduated from West Surrey College of Art and Design started his documentation of the New Age travellers as a small college project which grew into an all- consuming body of work: 'I became aware of constant stories in the papers - and had seen travellers pushed into the background at festivals like Glastonbury and Stonehenge,' he explains. 'I set out to redress the mainstream media representations and sensationalism which surrounds this unconventional way of life.'

He lived and worked on a range of travelling sites in the south west, including Midford and Monkton Farleigh near Bath. 'They were understandably sceptical when I first started talking to them,' he remembers, 'but when they saw the first contact sheets and realised the angle I was taking they warmed to me considerably and started to spread word around.'

One particular group welcomed Warburton into their community and provided him not only with his own caravan, but most of his visual material. Here are mothers bathing their children, families relaxing in caravans, watching television together and practising some of their festival skills - like juggling and sword-throwing.

'I chose to use glossy colour film in order to reflect the colourful lifestyle of the travellers,' he says. 'One of the problems of their image is that they're always presented in drab, grainy black- and-white newspaper print. It's misleading.

'Nevertheless their lives do seem harder every time I go back to see them. They don't deserve this and I hope my pictures go some way to showing why.'

'Travellers is at the Watershed, 1 Canon's Road, Bristol (0272 276444) to 14 August

(Photograph omitted)