I don’t have any recollection of the moment I became interested in taking pictures. There’s no childhood event to which I can trace my love for photography. No kindly relative or schoolteacher showing me my first camera. No inspirational moment that kindled the fires of artistic endeavour. It has happened, like most things, very gradually. Almost imperceptibly what started as a whim has become something central to my life. So central, in fact, that I decided to write and publish this website so as to share my journey with others.
I can’t offer a simple answer to the question ‘Why Photography?’. But maybe I can approach an answer by trying to discover what has kept me coming back to it again and again. What is it about producing images that holds such a powerful sway over me and many others like me? After all a photographic image is, at first glance, just a static object. It can be consumed entire with just such a momentary glance. Most of the images we encounter in our lives are bred and served for just this kind of consumption. They are made to be seen and swiped away, their message loud and clear and bordering on obnoxious. Perhaps this hints at one motivation: we who labour over our images wish to imbue them with some significance beyond the superficial.
Images have never been more profuse. Countless billions are captured daily and in almost caustic resolution. There has been a kind of devaluation of the image caused by increased production. Just as a currency loses value when a government prints money, so the value of any one image has been diminished by their general proliferation. Perhaps photography appeals to me because I have grown up just as this wave of image-making crested and crashed and its undercurrents began to suck meaning out of life. Somehow I want to reclaim some of that meaning before it is lost. Not that I claim to have achieved this with any of my photographs - maybe I never will - but the idea that images can be more than just throw-away status indicators is fascinating. Photography has had an interesting history. From scientific curiosity to technical mastery and pretensions of serious art in the hands of a few, to ubiquity in the hands of the masses. In terms of access no art form has had such a wide dissemination in such a short space of time. I think this ubiquity has had an interesting effect on photography. Rather than the proliferation of images causing a dilution of their power, it has served to throw the art of photography into sharper relief. A new generation of photographers have come to the medium without the pretensions of previous practitioners. You don’t need to master the technicalities of photography in order to create well-exposed, high-resolution images when you have an iPhone in your pocket. Image-making has become divorced from mastery. This is not a bad thing. The idea that art and mastery are synonymous is a relic of the past. But the past has a habit of hanging around in the collective unconscious and there are those of us who have a nagging feeling that the emptiness of meaning caused by modern image-making methods could be filled.