A lightening fast guide to my work

I’m all too aware that the images I constantly hoist upon the world might bring about some bemusement. So if you’ve ever wondered what its all about, here is my two minute guide.

Is photography art? Oh how the debate raged for over a century (it was 2008 when the English National Gallery first held a photographic exhibition, that of Tom Hunter).
Thanks to some cunning champions, not least Alfred Stieglitz and his 291 Gallery and Camera Work publication, that the likes of myself were born into a world, where only occasionally would we have to hear that most annoying of phrases, ‘but is it Art?’ usually followed by a few of the persons brain cells committing suicide from lack of purpose.

So it’s art. For the most part this was supported by the equation, it looks like art, it has the qualities of art and it transposes a meaning. In reality this meant, most probably black and white, printed with great craft and with the artist stating, ‘My work speaks for itself’, followed by an hour long speech, some lengthy reviews and the adding of a zero to the price.

Then one day a disgruntled and bored American aristocrat, William Eggleston, asked his friend, a certain Mr Warhol, “But what do I photograph, Memphis is so ugly?”
To which his deconstructionist friend replied. “Then photograph the ugliness.”
So shooting in colour the daring Mr Eggleston started a more democratic approach to the medium. You might say, he was the first to seek out the meaningful moments we all experience, each day. Those moments when your eyes briefly alights upon something pleasing; the light that spills in over the curtain top in the morning as you lay in bed, a shadow that crosses the yellow lines on the road or porcelain lovers embracing in a tat shop window. And for once this artist said nothing, for years, until at last fame would badger Mr Eggleston into submission and insist on a few odd but enlightening interviews.

This championing of the everyday has been one of the loudest cries to be heard in the art world these past thirty years, becoming almost deafening of late. The artfully printed black and white, framed print, almost lost to the contemporary galleries, as the championing of ever more democratic art becomes the order of the day; using disposable or poorly made plastic cameras, printing cheaply, celebrating imperfection, giving cameras to children or even dogs and hanging these works with drawing pins or any way but in a frame, are all de rigueur.  Like any new movement, it becomes a little too self aware and as I write there is a feeling that maybe its time to move on, to balance things up a little, like with the Sally Man exhibition (see previous blog). Photographers, like ducks, in a flooded market place, find there is there is room for all.

Take a beautiful landscape or a beautiful person and produce a beautiful picture, well there’s a knack to it, but so much more of a challenge to find beauty in that which is overlooked, in the flotsam of the city.

You can see aspects of this approach in the works of all the great photographers, going back as far as you’d like, but it’s with the likes of Eggleston and my personal favourite Keld Helmer Petersen, that you find whole bodies of work dedicated to this system. And this is where you’ll find me. Ambling around with my camera, trusting my instincts to notice these visually engaging moments, and then attempting to capture them in a way that might allow others to engage and respond.

I hope with some of my images, you find a moments resonance, but it’s a very personal journey and we’re on different paths, but maybe I’ve shone a little light onto mine that you might see it a little clearer.