I’m British, from Wolverhampton in the English Midlands, though since 2003 I’ve been living and working in Ypsilanti, MI, in the USA.
I’m primarily an analogue photographer, meaning that I work with film, paper and traditional photographic techniques. I do as much of the work as I can ‘in camera’, and by using various analogue printing techniques. I prefer working with vintage, toy, pinhole and a variety of cheap, plastic cameras. Not for any grand, artistic reasons, it’s simply that I like the look of the pictures they produce, and I like the way the cameras force me to work harder as a photographer.
By using cameras with little or no exposure and focus control, I’m forced to think hard about the things that are in my control: composition and how to use available light. It’s photography at its most basic, with all the bells and whistles stripped away. I find that refreshing and challenging, and I like being freed up to experiment and play with the rules, to rely a little on serendipity. If all goes well, my photographs emerge as soiled, imperfect reproductions of the world, rather than as some clean and perfect mirror image.
To me photography is a process. An organic process in which every stage feeds into every other, and the final result - the photograph - is just one of those equal stages. Creatively I get just as excited about standing on a cold, windy lakeshore waiting for a long exposure to elapse, as I do splashing fixer around in the darkroom, or trying a new printing technique, or digging through a box of expired film at a flea market, or experimenting with arcane processing methods, or being surprised at the serendipitous results of a light leak, or willing a Van Dyke print dry, or being annoyed when only one of my sixteen exposures came out, or reading about how someone hacked the lens on their toy camera, or watching through a viewfinder waiting for my wife to smile in just the right way so that I can click the shutter. When I’m making an image, all of those kinds of activities mix together to become essential parts of my process of Doing Photography.
You can read more about me and my photography in this recent Michigan in Pictures profile: Part I, Part II, Part III.
Over the last couple of years I’ve had a number of individual shows here Ypsilanti and in nearby Ann Arbor, and I’m currently showing an selection of my pinhole work at Bombadill’s in downtown Ypsilanti.