Introduction

I wrote this piece to explain why I make photographs and write.    I felt it necessary, not only to explain the reason for having spent so many hours creating this collection, but also to provide an insight into my work, so that viewers and readers might gain a deeper empathy.

Photography and writing are not hobbies as far as I’m concerned, casual pastimes to indulge when I feel like it.  Both are a way of life.

Human consciousness is a moving sliver of time.  There is only the present moment, which in a fraction less than an instant, becomes the past, becomes history.  I love photography because it has the potential to visually record the present moment in a meaningful and pleasing way, fixing it for me and perhaps someone else, to enjoy again in the future, potentially forever.  Writing, or more specifically Life Writing, is all about what I cannot photograph.

I sensed the passing of time early in life. I must have been about ten or eleven years old when, in a furness of fear, I suddenly realised my own mortality; the certainty, at some indeterminate point, of my own death. And then, oblivion. I have never believed in life after death, nor reincarnation for that matter.

How did the children’s Christmas part when I was nine years old, so long anticipated, pass so quickly in an excited blur, only to become just another memory?  It was my first lesson in the transience of life and happiness., the fleeting moment.  Years later, one Sunday afternoon, I lay alone in bed feeling unwell.  I’d just woken up, and at first the house seemed silent and still, but as I came to, I began to notice sound and movement.  A bedside clock ticked away the minutes.  A bright rectangle of reflected sunlight, just like in an Edward Hopper painting, crept slowly across the adjacent wall.  Somewhere nearby, a car accelerated into the distance. Two framed photographs stood on a chest of drawers in a shady corner of the room.  In one, a smiling young woman in a pretty floral dress bounced a baby on her knee.  Since then, my mother had aged markedly, and the baby was now a teenager.  In the other frame, a wartime sailor stood proudly in his uniform.  My father looked so young back then. Many years had past since those photographs were made. When I glanced around the room again, the sunlight had crept further along the wall, and the sound of the car had receded to silence.  My health felt precarious, as though hung by a frayed thread.  I sensed intensely, not only the passage of time, but the inevitability of change and my complete inability to control it. Only photography and writing have come to assuage this certain fate, this human condition.

No nurturing relative showed me the magic of an emerging photograph in a darkroom tray of developer, nor the wonderful prints of an interesting photographer.  No mentor ever suggested photography as a subject to study or a means of earning a living.  Instead, a friend gave me some old editions of National Geographic magazine, and inside the famous yellow rectangle, I discovered pages of colour photographs of fascinating places and people.  Then, one Saturday morning, I caught a bus into town, walked to the library and found a book by Ansel Adams.  In a nearby pub, sitting in streaming sunlight, I sipped a pint of lager and carefully studied each stunning photograph.  Soon, I was loitering outside camera shops eyeing up the precious instruments displayed in locked glass cabinets.

I purchased a Single Lens Reflex camera with a 50 mm lens in the spring of 1975 with money for my eighteenth birthday and loaded it with colour slide film.  I photographed family, friends and the surrounding area, and during our first family holiday abroad, enjoyed roaming around the streets of an old Spanish town, photographing people going about their business.  The following year, I took it with me on a month-long inter-rail holiday.  Being in a foreign land, camera in hand, and able to seize moments of novelty and interest, of life previously unseen, brought about an intense level of enjoyment and satisfaction.

Gradually, I taught myself the craft of making photographs.  I moved to York, got married and then, in 1982, I joined Impressions Gallery of Photography.  I started using the gallery’s darkroom, down in a dank and musty cellar.  Here, on solitary Saturday afternoons, I taught myself how to develop film and print black and white photographs.

In 1984, I joined a group of photographers who literally changed my life.  Most of them were like-minded and passionate about their craft.  We met regularly, showed each other our work, had weekends away to discuss photography and occasionally held joint exhibitions.  Some have remained close friends to this day.  That same year, one of them told me about a Joseph Koudelka exhibition at the Hayward Gallery on the South Bank in London.  I took a day off work and I caught the train down.  The exhibition electrified me.  With goose bumps covering my arms and shivers of excitement running down my spine, I studied each of the incredible photographs of the Russian invasion of Prague.  Paint splattered tanks with machine guns confronting unarmed students, some opening their coats to say, “Come on then, shoot me!”  Koudelka’s photographs of gypsies were equally evocative.  From that moment onwards, I felt fully committed to my own photography.

Reading introductions to the work of famous photographers like Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank amplified my passion for, and commitment to, photography.  Cartier-Bresson wrote, “To take photographs is to hold one’s breath when all faculties converge in the face of fleeing reality.  It is at that moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.  As far as I am concerned, [it] is a means of understanding which cannot be separated from other means of visual expression.  It is a way of shouting, of freeing oneself, not of proving or asserting one’s own originality.  It is a way of life”.

In an introduction to Robert Frank's work, Rudolph Wurlitzer brilliantly described the potential of the medium when he wrote, "There are photographs here that haunt me as if I've been inside them before; photographs that come forward like incantations, suddenly awakened mysteries full of illumined silence.  Loneliness and hope, decay and poetry, grief and survival, and those rare moments when a man happens on his own essence.”

While I have an eclectic approach to my photography, humanity and the human condition interest me the most.  My camera has become a conduit to human engagement, establishing connections with strangers, and discovering shared interests and concerns. During challenging times, indeed, some personally desperate times, photography has kept me going, step by step, whether processing a film, printing or walking out with my camera.

Rather than feel sad for very long, suffer low mood or feel the pain of loss and grief, it has enabled me to confront it, capture it and then move on.  It’s a cathartic mechanism I’ve turned to many times and my mental health has always benefited.

Photography has always gone hand in glove with my love of history.  At best, it’s about time as much as about light.  Writing a journal has satisfied a deep need to record my life and later review and relive certain moments.  Long ago, I realised I also want to participate in the moment, physically experience and enjoy life in real time, not solely observe from a distance, isolated and detached.  Having engaged with the subject, even if briefly, the resultant photograph can acquire greater value and importance, especially as that fleeting moment recedes into history.  Photographs and life writing extend memory and offer the possibility of providing insight and enjoyment to future generations.  I certainly hope so.

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