About

I am a UK-based photographer working in fine art, though I came to it later than most. I studied Art at college, where a project on David Hockney first introduced me to the idea of using photographs to make art, rather than merely to document. Work & architecture claimed the years that followed: I started my first practice at nineteen, & spent the following three decades building & running firms of my own. It is only in the last couple of years, as I have made more room for myself, that I have returned to that early pull toward image-making. I bought a camera again shortly after turning fifty, & have been on that journey since.

I have little interest in the clean or the perfect. What draws me instead are moments slightly at odds with the expected, images capable of standing on their own terms as pieces of art, rather than crisp, well-lit records of a scene. I try to capture the emotion within a moment: a stillness, a sense of calm or reflection, whether in a place or a person. That is what I am really pursuing: instances of peace or deep reflection, wherever they happen to surface. A stretch of coastline held long enough for the sea to soften into mist, with only the horizon left fixed, is one example; so is a dancer caught mid-turn, the room around her blurred by the exposure while her expression stays almost still. I keep a camera close at hand wherever I go, so as not to let such moments pass. My visual language is still finding its edges, & I expect it to keep evolving, but a clearer sense of purpose has begun to develop, & what I once noticed only in passing I am now shaping into proper bodies of work.

Many of my compositions are flat-on, close to an architectural elevation, a discipline of proportion & structure I suspect I absorbed from thirty years spent designing buildings & reading drawings. It sits in some tension with the rest of my method, since I treat the camera itself as a rather blunt instrument: long exposure, intentional camera movement, working with light & shade rather than against them, so that little emerges looking settled or obvious. That friction, between a controlled frame & an uncontrolled result, is close to the heart of what I am trying to do. I would rather an image raise a question than answer one, & I am reluctant to tell a viewer what they ought to feel in front of my work; that is not for me to decide.

I gave a great many years wholly to work & to building businesses, rarely finding the time to look beneath the surface of the world around me, or, sadly, to consider my own relationship with it. I have always placed a high value on freedom, which is probably why I have spent most of my working life answerable chiefly to myself. Photography has become a way of slowing down, & of asking myself some of the questions I never quite got around to.