Welcome
Each body of work I produce is the culmination of a number of journeys through the landscape by car, bus, bicycle or on foot. A journey, for me, is never the straightforward use of a fast road. The bland functionality of motorways and trunk roads has its appeal but I find my curiosity too strong to repeat the same routes and mode of transport all of the time. Deviations from major roads and from the car, whilst primarily satisfying my curiosity, can be the nascent stage of any idea or research; with more specific intineries happening once subject matter has been identified, or located.
The seeds of an idea may be initiated many years before a project is fully realised. So my series of rural petrol garages had some origins in a conversation with a friend whilst on our way to photograph military ranges on Salisbury Plain back in the early 1990’s. Ideas are built up layer by layer through time; the conversation was revisited once I moved to the Somerset Levels in 1998, where there were still a number of small rural petrol stations evident in many of the local villages. Many of my projects are inspired by my locality initially, but then spiral out into a wider area once they appear to form a coherent set.
Challenging preconceptions about the landscape and photography is a positive thing but being confrontational is not the main aim of my work. As someone that enjoys the aesthetics of the ordinary, banal or even derelict I therefore take pictures with the assumption that there are like minded individuals attending my exhibitions or clicking onto my web pages. The fact that the work challenges is something of a by product; which is no bad thing.
The seeds of an idea may be initiated many years before a project is fully realised. So my series of rural petrol garages had some origins in a conversation with a friend whilst on our way to photograph military ranges on Salisbury Plain back in the early 1990’s. Ideas are built up layer by layer through time; the conversation was revisited once I moved to the Somerset Levels in 1998, where there were still a number of small rural petrol stations evident in many of the local villages. Many of my projects are inspired by my locality initially, but then spiral out into a wider area once they appear to form a coherent set.
Challenging preconceptions about the landscape and photography is a positive thing but being confrontational is not the main aim of my work. As someone that enjoys the aesthetics of the ordinary, banal or even derelict I therefore take pictures with the assumption that there are like minded individuals attending my exhibitions or clicking onto my web pages. The fact that the work challenges is something of a by product; which is no bad thing.