Photography
My photography
I use photography to show something about where I’ve been or people whom I’ve met. As well as trying to see the beauty in a scene or situation, I’m also trying to convey ideas and feelings. My photography is about me and what I do, who I meet and where I go. All my photography tries to be contemporary and creative. I’m resistant to being fitted in to a taxonomy by categorisation such as “travel” or “conceptual” or “nature”. All image-making is political simply by the act of selection and hence exclusion but I am not campaigning for any particular point of view, except to try to see the positives and to live life to the full.
I use 645, 35mm and DX formats plus a handy little digital compact that shoots RAW files. I’ve experimented with non-lens photography - do ask!
I first worked in a monochrome/silver wet darkroom at age 7, helping my Father with scientific prints; I’ve used colour negative materials since age 21 and digital since 2005. I use Photoshop (Adobe) and Photopaint (Corel).
Heatwave in Marseille that the French call “La canicule”.
Dust to dust, ashes to ashes; new and old graves amongst the grass grilled to straw by the heatwave. Dusty Margravine cemetery in Hammersmith, conveniently close to Charing Cross hospital, that rose from the dust of the previous Hammersmith hospital. The grass, too will be reborn from the dust after the rain falls.
Above, an airplane on final approach to Heathrow airport, that pervasive symbol of our carbon economy which threatens us with extinction through climate change.
Bricking up of famous and much-loved street art in the Brighton Lanes. These vibrant designs will no longer shine in the sunlight. New homes will immure in darkness all the murals of Kensington Street. The paint won’t be removed but the clean new brickwork has started to surround and submerge the artwork.
The nearby redevelopment of Hanningtons has revealed Puget’s Cottage for the first time in 140 years - is it too fanciful to think that in the future these much-loved artworks will be disinterred as representations of a glorious age of freedom flowering here in BN1?
Roses at Batemans, Rudyard Kipling’s house on the Sussex Weald and golden fields looking like Tuscany but at Falmer on the South Downs in Sussex.
The pleasures of summer in the gardens at Nymans on the Sussex Weald. Quintessentially English!
