My approach to photography is essentially an extension of my approach to life: to observe, absorb and reflect. As a child, I experienced the world with wonder and fascination and with a keen sense of communion with both the people and the things, animate and inanimate, that comprise our world. No less true today with or without a camera as my lens although now everything is inevitably filtered through the billions of bits and bytes of images, information, opinions, and impressions stored in my brain.
Simply put, people, places and things are what I shoot; memory, imagination and wonder are how. My work explores the intersection of essence and illusion inherent in this viewpoint and my response to available light both exaggerates and refines these intersections and their precincts. I often choose to either let the light overwhelm the camera rendering benignly corrupted files whose distortions and omissions can be coaxed to produce a sinuous fluidity of light and colour or, conversely, I allow its absence to “under develop” the files necessitating that colour and light be “restored” resulting in a painterly texture to the image.
This processing or painting helps render images which depict or suggest the “real”, the remembered, and the imagined simultaneously perceived as one views the world around them. Light allowing one to see in a different light. Working in this manner facilitates my desire to create images which are both depictions of and reactions to what I photograph.
I rely on and trust in the congruence between the digital algorithms and my mental synapses to create a hybrid image, part depiction, part memory, part imagination. I am most pleased with a photo when it evokes both recognition and surprise
In 2002, when I picked up a camera for the first time in twenty odd years, I hoped to both record and interpret the world around me. Now, I realize, my best work celebrates it.
I remain delighted and inspired by the great Robert Doisneau (1912-1994) who said ”My photographs are all self-portraits, done with compassion and a bit of mockery and the secret hope of setting the established order of things slightly askew.”