Still life

Tim Andrews. Photograph: Kitty Gayle. Click on the image to view the photo gallery.

Tim Andrews' life changed in the autumn of 2005 when he was driving home one evening and noticed his thumb would not stop shaking. Andrews consulted his doctor, who confirmed that the 54-year-old solicitor had Parkinson's disease. "I had been feeling I was not working as hard as before," he recalls. "Now I realised why."

Initially, Andrews thought he could continue in his job, but when even holding a pen became difficult he accepted that his working life was over. "I was very lucky in having an insurance policy that would give me a proportion of my salary," he says, "so when the consultant said I could give up work and he would support my application for the insurance policy, I just burst into tears at the enormity of realising I was free. I could finally walk away from the job I'd had for 29 years."

Andrews had become a lawyer almost by accident, but had always dreamed of being an actor. "When I was a solicitor, I would spend my evenings putting on plays," he says "because I longed for a more creative life."

The door to that creative life was opened by an advertisement in Time Out magazine in spring 2007 from Graham Montgomery, who was looking for people to photograph nude for a book. "I thought it would be cool to be photographed by a professional photographer, so I got in touch and really loved the whole experience." Andrews answered more adverts in the next week's issue, and then went online to Gumtree, the classified ads website. "Online, there were many, many other photographers looking for subjects – it was then I realised I had a project."

Over the next three years, that project has mushroomed from sideline hobby to full-time obsession: 128 photographers have taken their portrait of the married father of two. In the images – on display this month – we see Andrews in many guises and moods: naked in a cardboard box; a made-up drag queen; in some he appears defeated and in others defiant. In addition to amateur photographers, Andrews began contacting established photographers whose work he admired, such as Harry Borden and Rankin, and persuaded them to take his photograph. "My picture was led by him," Rankin says. "He decided what he was going to wear and it was almost like it was his photograph taken with my camera." Rankin says the fact that Andrews had Parkinson's lent his image greater symbolism. "During the shoot, he was shaking a hell of a lot," he says, "but from seeing the photograph you would never know he had Parkinson's – the photograph has the power to make him still again."

In Rankin's monochrome portrait, Andrews is naked – as he is in a quarter of all the portraits. Why is he so keen to take off his clothes? "For me, the nakedness represents a stripping away of layers of identity, and also a sense of freedom that I don't have to be what anyone expects." Liz Orton, whose portrait of Andrews depicts him crouched naked inside a cardboard box, suggests his fondness for nudity reflects a new disinhibited attitude that came from no longer being a solicitor. "The box picture was shot on slow speed," she adds, "to try to pick up the involuntary movements that are predominantly in his hands and head. The idea came from a conversation we had when he described a slowly diminishing tower of boxes as a metaphor for the way he'd taken back control of his life since he'd got Parkinson's."

The shadow of the disease hangs over the images in the project. Andrews knows that if he stops taking his medication, his symptoms will worsen. "Without the drugs I would be much less animated," he says, "I would be drawn, react and speak slowly. I know the pills combat only the symptoms, they do not cure it: Parkinson's only gets worse – it never gets better." The threat the disease poses is captured in Danielle Tunstall's arresting portrait, Beautiful Decay. In the image, Andrews is wearing a skull mask while clutching a bouquet of yellow roses. Tunstall, a former cleaner who lives on a council estate in Leamington Spa, took up photography only two and a half years ago. "I used to paint 10 years ago, but when I had children I stopped. Getting the camera was like a weight off my shoulders, giving me back my creative freedom." That sense of liberation is also palpable in Tim Andrews.

When I ask what he would say to those who accuse him of rampant egotism, he tells me, "I can't argue with anyone who would say that – the truth is I love the idea of people looking at pictures of me." He seems so creatively stimulated, I wonder if he ever speculated what life would be like had he remained a solicitor. "If I was doing what I was still doing, I would be miserable," he says, "overworked and even more stressed out than I was before I left." The irony is that it was the diagnosis of a disease that ultimately impedes mobility that prompted Andrews to get his life moving. "So if someone said we can take away the Parkinson's," I ask, "but it would mean giving up all this, would you do it?" Andrews does not even pause. "I would say, 'Thanks but no thanks,'" he says firmly, "I prefer now. Getting Parkinson's opened the door – it has given me a new lease of life."

• An exhibition of Tim Andrews portraits is at the Lightbox gallery, Woking, until 27 February. See photographer Chris Floyd's film of Tim Andrews.