This site has been constructed in summer 2006 and will be under ongoing construction for the forseeable future. It affords an overview of my practice to date and contains projects that are ongoing as well as those that are complete (some of which, for various reasons, and perhaps for the best - time will tell - have not been exhibited or published). One of the reasons for these hidden works - apart that is from all the usual doubts and questioning was perhaps my headlong rush to escape my other brief life as a research chemist and embrace a certain sense of freedom that I still associate with photography. This pursuit of light and shadow, of forty shades of grey, or of millions of pixels of colour is a journey for life and as the saying goes ‘my ambition is to live forever - so far so good’.

Truth is Made of Infinite Small Pieces

As a photographer of ‘the real world’ I am compelled to engage with the necessary ritual of placing myself in front of my subject/object and dealing with the vagaries of light and mood. This for me, of late, has been deeply rooted in the landscape wherein I excavate specific landscapes with photography and time. This usually involves a process of visiting and revisiting small areas over prolonged periods. I try to carry in my pockets small seeds of emotional and conceptual intelligence that, on good days, manage to make a connection with what is around me. My quest is a series of what I consider as ‘elusive’ rather than ‘decisive’ ‘moments’ - a dialogue between myself and what chooses to be photographed. Often, there is a wider political framework but it can be purely personal or if I am really lucky, both.
Lewis Baltz has said that photography occupies a narrow but deep area that lies between cinema and the novel. I like this description both conceptually and in terms of practice in that it fixes photography in the world but also aligns it to the narrative form with all that that implies i.e. in essence a creative interpretation of reality, a fiction bound to reality and truth.
With this in mind I have, to date, made bodies of work by using a form appropriate to the theme or subject and as a result what may appear at first sight to be quite disparate works all emanate from the same well. This has been shaped not only by format but also by the frame employed. I feel that this aspect of the frame - active, passive, neutral - as determined by shape is often neglected in discussions around photography. It is, after all, what distinguishes us as photographers; we are like old-fashioned cowboys who cast our frames like lassos in order to bring our concepts and subjects back to us and yet the very shape of this frame can have a significant effect on any subsequent reading or interpretation. Aligned to this is the format which likewise can be active, passive, neutral.