Like Henri Cartier-Bresson wrote, “For me, the camera is like a sketch book” I too use the camera to make sense and make art of the world.
I don’t set out to produce art about one subject or another. I use photography as a means of self-expression, as a means to document the world around me. I make pictures that call attention to things that other people mostly overlook. This exploration of the overlooked helps me engage more deeply with where I am in space and time. My aim is to make photographs that draw viewers into the now. Most people see the world in color: lustrous, radiant, glossy and saturated… while the world of black and white offers the basics – light and shadow falling on various surfaces, beautiful, rich and inviting shadows, geometries, lines, shapes and bold designs.
I grew up in England where my father, an amateur photographer, introduced me to the magic of the black and white dark room, how to compose by the contrast of light and dark, and how to capture the evocative landscape scene. My influences are first and foremost everything I see, feel and experience.
Influences from photographers are many, not least of which have guided me through creative vision workshops include Ansel Adams, John Sexton, Bruce Barnbaum and John Paul Caponigro… I also love the silent world of Michael Kenna.
My recently published work and exhibitions highlighting the Polar Regions focusses on the environment and what is profoundly at stake. What is at stake? The true essence – the spiritual essence, if you will – of nature’s importance that has been sidelined by politicians and business people. The Arctic, where sea ice is rapidly diminishing, possesses great threat to the existence of the Polar Bear. Arctic sea ice is the Polar Bear’s feeding habitat. As the sea ice disappears, bear mortality rate rises. In 2008, the polar bear became the first animal to be added to the Endangered Species act list of threatened species because of global warming. As the world’s ice caps and glacier’s continue to melt and shrink at alarming rates, trouble almost certainly looms. Antarctica, the coldest, driest and windiest place on earth is experiencing unprecedented ice melt in the Western Peninsula, the world’s most vulnerable ice sheet.
I am drawn to the Polar Regions whose magnificence stands as monuments to nature, grandeur of light and space and texture and form… As a lover of music, I find amidst them a never ending array of melodies, harmonies and overtones. It is music captured in ice… complex, yet simple, stately and at times solemn, and above all else, inspiring…
My work is a reconnection to the past and the immense issues facing the world’s climate.
As Charlie Parker said, “Music is your own experience, your thoughts your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out your horn.”
I travel to see the world, to know the world, to know myself and to show others what I have found, to show others what is.