I am a documentary photographer working mostly in colour, and often through the medium of a series or group of images. Whether the work is autonomous or assignment, my aim is not to encapsulate or reveal some single ‘essential’ notion of the subject, but rather to create a more complex, layered and multifaceted image or cycle of images that reflects the ephemeral, mercurial nature of our constructed selves. I aim to produce images the viewer can look around and get lost in, that seek not to answer questions but to ask them.
The popularity of reality television has created a preoccupation with discovering the real or the genuine. But the notion that reality and genuineness can be revealed by direct observation is of course incoherent: the very act of observing, either through the medium of a camera lens or a TV creates an awareness in the subject which precludes the natural they will, to some extent, always be ‘performing the self’. I am therefore primarily interested not in the relationship between the subject and the lens, nor indeed between the subject and myself, but rather in casting a critical and questioning eye on the relationship between the subject and their environment. Thus, images which at first glance may have a simple, somewhat detached quality, will I hope on further inspection reveal a complexity and an intimacy created by the subject in relation to their own possessions and surroundings.
In exploring and illuminating this relationship I am also drawn to the consistencies and inconsistencies, the discrepancies and the tensions between the public and the private self. Bright colour and distracting compositional elements are used to draw the viewer’s attention away from the normally dominant (public) subject/lens relationship and to create a sense of flicking to and from the subject and the ‘background’ both elements interacting to invite speculation about the other. Perhaps conclusions may be drawn from these speculations but my aim is that such conclusions should subvert expectation and undermine judgment based on stereotype.
These colour and compositional complications may be amplified and echoed throughout a series, lending an unsettling, sometimes dark and puzzling aspect. I aim to produce thought provoking images and connections between images that intrigue not by slapping you in the face but by gently sneaking up on you and catching you unawares.