Fine Art Photographer / Writer
Artist's Biography Page:
Photography for me began as a hobby, gravitated into a profession and has now emerged as a way of life. Having worked as a commercial photographer, I now take pictures of subjects that inspire me for the fine art market.
My fascination is with light and the mental process of contemplating its action on whatever subject I focus on. As Edward Steichen said: "Where there is light there is photography". I find myself on a mundane level continually absorbed by the way that light reveals different forms and surfaces and textures, but I am also trying to understand it symbolically in my work. I feel that light is symbolic of consciousness and so-called enlightenment, the dawning of clarity in the darkness of unconscious everyday living. In fact I only feel truly "awake" when I am contemplating light by shooting or printing! Light is of course less evident when unaccompanied by its polar opposite, shadow. I tend to search out photographic moments when light is just emerging from an encroaching darkness, as symbolic of a gradual awakening to consciousness. When it comes together, a photograph can transcend the straight subject matter. I can spend hours looking at prints, revisiting the original scene through the image to discover more of its hidden wealth.
I'd like to describe myself as a still-life photographer without a studio! Having spent a long time working in the carefully structured environment of the studio with its artificial lighting I now find it a challenge to seek out naturally occurring still lives wherever I travel. And for me it is all still life: a natural feature, a piece of sculpture, a flower, even something as large as a building is an object which reveals the effect of light. Portraits too present an opportunity to study the sculpted form of a sitter's face.
Right now, I find that black and white photography, with its reduction of the scene to form-revealing tones, speaks eloquently of the passage of light. The specular highlight on the face of a carved sculpture, the deep shadows in rippled sand dunes, the illuminated planes of a stark modern building: black and white manages to convey all these light effects. A lull in my work as a professional photographer led me to take up drawing and sculpting which helped me to better understand the representation of form in monochrome.
Over the years I have also pursued "extra curricular" interests in psychology, mythology, altered states and Eastern religions. I believe the collective term for this is "Holy Grail hunting". I never found it, but my study of Zen Buddhism brought me back to an appreciation of photography as a way of contemplating the seen world, and thereby discovering something beautiful and mysterious, even sacred, within it. I hope above all that my photographs reflect a reverential fascination with whatever I look at.
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