Over 40 years as a photographer, I can say with some certainty that I've learnt the most - not from photographers, but from the 2D and 3D visual artists I've admired, met or collaborated with over the years: people who paint, sketch, sculpt, draw and observe their subjects and themes with deep investigations of form, and glorious renditions of the transformative power of light. I'm often stunned into silence by events and situations where light seems to channel something magnificent, or new, or transformational.
Landscape
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Light painting
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Still Life
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People
3D scan ~
Light Capture ~
Ai-free
Landscape ~ Light painting ~ Still Life ~ People 3D scan ~ Light Capture ~ Ai-free
I wrote in my first book, Creative Vision (2005), about how my earliest influences and memories were - as they are for most people - primarily visual: my grandmother Eva's landscape oil paintings, penguins at the zoo, Frank Hampson's eerily surreal Ladybird book illustrations. I wrote my second book, Design Principles (2010, 2nd ed. 2020), to share the work of some great photographers whose works were wedded to the formal elements of design, composition and lasting visual power - because all of these elements arose from the art world's legacy of (predominantly) painting. These formal design concerns completely predate the invention of photography, leaving my own photography to honour the history of art as much as anything else.
As a photographer, I explore work right across the entire spectrum - producing work in series, sequences and single images, both sprinters and marathon-runners - and I relish the rich diversity of approaches the medium offers.
So I find myself now, at the ripe old age of 62, coming around full circle; right back at the beginning, wondering how the hell I came to be here, and how to thank those with the deepest love who indulged me and allowed me to reach this point - whereby I've not really made a great job of selling myself, because I've just been too busy making the work. Relentlessly. And I'm nowhere near finished.
Although I continue to be fascinated by (and still use) pixels, digital processes and the many technological innovations of contemporary photographic practice, I won't be going anywhere near AI image-making - since this has nothing to do with Light Capture, or even the human struggle for expression: "Striving", as Nick Cave once put it. I seem to have hit that wall pretty hard, and I'll be reversing from here on in, seeking to use Light in the most direct and economical means possible, returning photography to its roots. I'll be archiving my work, paying it forward, bequeathing some, sealing and burying some in time capsules, "homing" others, dispersing my images like atoms of carbon - so that they take on new forms, connect or disconnect with the future, and generally just workshopping my skills and experiences, or writing about my life-long relationship with photography for my Magnum Opus: CarbonC6. That's the plan, anyway. We'll see if it works out or not.
Light painting has been my major area of interest; I started to explore slow exposure and moving light in the pre-digital era, with film. But then, my love of landscape, documentary and still life, of black-and-white printing and everything else I've explored over 40 years, also began in the film era. Artists and photographers exploring the nature and characteristics of Light, and the process of seeing and observation, are nothing new - but my "journey", if you like, bridges that time-critical gap between the "old", "slow" era of film and the advent and mass adoption of all things digital and super-fast.
Putting up these galleries and portfolios on my website here, in the tertiary stage of my life, is a kind of running flow from decades of work - a kind of wallpapering of my little corner of the world, from one of the most productive photographers working in the UK today. That's my one and only brag, I promise you. I spent the first 20 years of my post-art-school life running a small commercial photography enterprise - events, products, brochure work, some editorial, that kind of thing - but I never really enjoyed it much, and always felt compromised and creatively restrained.
Learning about Light during that time gave me so many epiphanies, the most powerful of which was seeing - under the raking light used in curatorial photography at the Sainsbury Centre - the sweeping traces and contours of the actual bristles of Picasso's brush, in a painting that had just returned from restoration. It was like a lightning bolt, up close, but not even recorded on film: the priority was to capture the painting in full, rather than attempt detail shots like the one I caught in my mind's eye during that moment.
Other highlights of my film-era life include working as assistant to David Bailey; travelling freely and without responsibility to shoot stock for image libraries; hiking and backpacking Mediterranean Europe; time spent as expedition photographer in Tanzania; and shooting endless Captain's Tables on cruise ships in the Caribbean. Getting too close to angry hippos in a dug-out in the Rufiji Delta, I realised I was dumb enough to go to any length if it meant getting the picture. At one time or another during these years, I was also levitated, haunted, and deported. Life was certainly rich with experience.
I picked up more and more teaching once the digital realm started to take hold of commercial photography, and managed 2 online diplomas in photography; one of which was self-written with challenging assignments and saw over 200 students qualify - long before the Covid years and the emergence of endless online tutoring on YouTube. I once taught photography to a blind student, wrote a photography Boot Camp for schools, and live-streamed a series of darkroom seminars in real time with Curious Directive - viewers following my instructions at home on their screens, having taken delivery of our carefully prepared darkroom kits to set up in their kitchens and attics.
In the last 20 years - since the peak and mass-adoption of the ubiquitous digital camera - I've been running my photographic life as an art practice: selling editioned prints of my choosing, making work I'm proud of, hosting exhibitions and workshops, embracing risk, and generally channelling that student of light I always was and always will be. I've enjoyed seeing the 2nd edition of one of my books become a set text in North American universities. I remain happily married, with two beautiful children now in their early thirties, and despite the lack of any semblance of a remunerative career, I still feel like I'm succeeding with my life goals. I'm still buzzing with energy, physically fit enough to run up every staircase I find - and photography still gets me out of bed every morning.
10 years ago, I immersed myself in the artist's process further, by becoming a life model. You'll find an overlap here, in some of the galleries, where the body meets light, meets observation and perception. Working with artists has been my greatest pleasure in recent years, as I've always strived to make my photography somehow "painterly", having acknowledged and honoured those early influences in my life. As a life model, I've shot a series of artist group panoramics (artist groups in life-drawing classes or meet-ups always tend to arrange themselves in a crescent shape, lending themselves immediately to a slow pan, left to right). I've also come up with a satirical series called "Ceilings I Have Loved", which is still in development. Recently I've started to shoot other life models using pinhole, and this is producing something rare and unexpected. This is what comes of never saying NO to an idea - and the material I'm building from this fascinating, experiential crossover of life and character modelling with photography will, I hope, be the content of my next book.
I've explored Surrealism, documentary, interior and exterior space, people, the body, the environment, expressionist landscapes of the mind, pinhole, scanography, iPhonography, film, flora, slitscan, 3D and VR - it's all up for grabs, so long as it's light-based, with light capture at its heart and core. My current professional concerns are centred on producing work that reaches a personal benchmark of CDE - Clarity, Directness and Economy - and my light painting always delivers the unexpected and unplanned-for, because Light will always find its own way: with people, faces, things, basically anything with carbon in it. Hence #carbonC6
5 years ago, in order to be even more immersed in my long-term love of the Norfolk coast, I immersed myself in the sea itself, finding a way to take long swims in the North Sea and shoot on my iPhone at the same time. I also started shooting riverbank life in my native Norfolk from some of my languid, summery kayak drifting - and learning to body-surf, relatively late in life.
Currently, I'm opening up a community darkroom in the heart of my home city, Norwich, which I'll be delighted to embed into the local community for the community to run themselves. A little support team is already growing, and from that seed, the willingness and intent to grow this simple idea will emerge - of that I have no doubt. Big, big thank-yous to designer Niki Medlik, and to MOPA founder Hannah Wooller and her team at Matter Of Place Architects for hosting Dark Mode darkroom.
Photography has given me such a rich life - travel, opportunity, learning, collaboration, lasting friendships, human insight, and the desire to take nothing at face value, to interrogate vigorously, and to achieve something unique. The benchmark I offer all my students is this: Show Me Something The Like Of Which I Have Never Seen Before. Have a wander in my Wonder Wallpaper galleries, and give me a shout if you see anything you like the look of. A lot of my image-making is about taking sideways looks at very mundane subjects and themes - and then doing it My Way :-)
I'll offer you generous repro rights for editorial, or a quote for a decent print, editioned or multiple. I won't charge the earth for it, but I will quote you a price commensurate with my "veteran" experience and years of immersion in the medium. My work will continue to be dispersed and reconstituted in different forms; it will age, it will connect, it will carry history with it. It will continue to be - in one form or another - as clear and hard and light as diamonds, or as wasted and worthless as soot, charcoal, or dust: the chance dust of the universe.
#carbonC6
