Compare and Contrast

Southampton Old Cemetery

July 2017

I like to look back through my image-file folders to remind myself what I was doing at the same time last year – where I was, what the weather was like, and so on – especially when we're having a long run of notable weather like this current uncharacteristic summer heatwave. For me, these files (arranged by camera, then month, then year) constitute a very effective sort of diary. Unlike the entries in a written journal ("Another day of fine weather. Went to the Old Cemetery. Took photographs.") a set of photographs represents a much fuller spectrum of sense data, including, paradoxically, those that are absent: I can still hear the dry rustle of a steady western breeze blowing through the dry grasses of the Old Cemetery in the photo above, as well as the shouts of a game of football on the Common, just beyond those trees. Now that I've mentioned it, I expect you can, too.

There is a strange belief, implicitly shared by many photographers, that they have been personally responsible for all the pictorial elements and the arrangement thereof that have been recorded by their camera, as if they were packshot photographers, painters, or cinematographers; a belief reinforced by critiques that pore over accidental details in the best photographs as if they were clever brushstrokes in a Rembrandt. It is a form of magical thinking, and equally delusional. Wiser photographers take a justified but limited pride in their ability to be out in the world, notice things, improvise a suitable composition, and record it. That is what "f/8 and be there" means (unless you're a "blurry backgrounds" obsessive, in which case substitute "f/1.8 and be there"). But, in a world awash with photographs, I think we're finding that to get beyond this flood of documentary, indexical photography to the foothills of art now requires more than the venerable simplicity of "f/8 and be there".

I like to think I have an uncommon ability for that reactive, observational style of photography, and it has sustained my creative impulse for the 30 years it has been constrained by work and family commitments. But – now that I am off the leash and free to do whatever I want – I find it's no longer enough. Taking many photographs, getting the chance to exhibit my work, abroad and at home, pursuing multiple photographic "projects" and sequencing the results in books... These no longer hit the spot for me. Photography as an art-form – like proper journalism, the compilation of reference works, or high-street retail – is under severe pressure from the paradigm-shifts introduced by the internet. If you wanted to exaggerate, you might even say it's "over": Bye Bye, Photography, Dear. So, increasingly, my photos are becoming the starting point in an improvisational game of associations and transformations, played out in my head and on my computer screen, a game which enables me to build something I find more personal, more completely satisfying, and more self-sufficient out of the raw materials mined from the rich seams of my image-file folders. Above all, I want to make something more expressively complex, and more intentional. It's not that I want to control your response, but that I want to give you something richer and stranger to respond to.

Whether the end results are true works of art or meretricious abominations is, in the end, not for me to judge. Doubtless, my efforts swing from one pole to the other. All I know is that I get an enormous amount of enjoyment from doing it and, for what it's worth, it seems that people are more willing to part with hard cash to own a picture like the one below than they are to buy a copy of its originating photograph above. Which is a shame, in some ways, but, although sales are hardly the only or even the best measure of artistic success, they are surely the most sincere form of flattery, and the only metric that will also keep you well-stocked with printer paper and ink.