All the photography included in this Blog was shot with my 35mm Olympus OM1-n and the black and white photographs were hand-printed in the darkroom. I currently choose not to use digital cameras as part of my practice. I am interested in almost all forms of non-digital photography and I am very keen to explore different photographic techniques, with and without the use of a camera.
‘Chipped Buildings’ are from a series of photographs of the East End and feature the recurring theme of the ‘lost city’ and the unsettling beauty of urban decay. I am particularly interested in artists who travel the city such as Bruce Davidson and Rut Blees Luxemburg and I have been reading the books of Ian Sinclair to help me think about the importance of looking at the background elements of the city. I am fascinated by long exposure night photography, - the photographs of Luxemburg and Brassai are strong examples of this, in their images artificial light appears to be almost burnt into the photographic paper.
‘Beautiful London Collage Book’ uses the ‘found’ image; it is made by cutting into the pages of a book I discovered. This process combined purposefulness with allowing a chance collage to appear when cutting into each page. ‘Slide projection Overlays’ uses 35mm slides with captions from ‘The Associated Press’archive (dated 1975). Projecting 2 slides simultaneously, I then re-photographed the layered images. Here I looked at how newspapers attempt to convey the essence of an event through one image. In all of this work I was interested in the quality of the collaged image and the experience of ‘seeing’ produced by cutting and superimposing and I was influenced by John Stezaker and Harry Callahan. I am now working in the darkroom superimposing my own photographs .
Other photos here were taken at the recent demonstrations in London and they focus on individuals in the midst of the march.
