Art: I had my first taste of freedom as a three year old, my Mum found me happy, with my tricycle, half a mile from the house at the local shops. From the age of seven I would walk a couple of miles away, across the fields, to the woods, or I’d ride my bicycle to Beacon Hill, enjoying the natural surroundings, watching the seasons, climbing trees and rock faces, finding interesting stones and observing the wildlife. On holiday, in Wales or the West Country, in an unfamiliar environment, it would be the same: On a family hike I would often go on ahead through the excitement of seeing what might be around the next corner or over the next hill, or I would get left behind, looking under stones for slow worms and lizards or finding the best way of crossing a stream that we didn’t need to ford. At the beach I would go clambering over the rocks looking for that elusive hidden rock pool teaming with life or being the first person to tread over the sand and discover a cave. Both of my parents had enjoyed a similar childhood to mine, a childhood experienced by very few today.
My photographic vision throughout has been constant. I see the world in wide-angle, I notice what is going on in the periphery. You can’t put truth in a box, or put a neat fence around it, or confine it to a fraction of a second. I explore the whole and if there is too much to submit to memory, too much to contemplate or explain I’ll explore the hole; just a part of it in great detail; a beach, a clearing in the forest, a City street corner, a cave.
I have been exploring the North Devon coast for the last three years. My study is of the hidden coast found only through a vertiginous climb down a cliff path or by leaving the sandy beach and trekking over seaweed shrewn boulders at low tide. This is a wild coast, unpopulated by holiday-makers, the domain of seagulls who can make you feel quite unwelcome. It is also an historic coast where millions of years can be seen in the layers of strata of an eroded cliff face and the more recent past can be found in smooth rusting ship parts, in memorial of hundreds of wrecks, littering the rocky shore.
These photographs have only been made possible through the technology of digital imaging. I have embraced this new medium and challenged it to assist with the documenting of what is seen at the back of a cave. To most, the inside of a cave is black and the bright surface world is pictured through a heavy dark frame; but here we see the glorious true colour and texture through long exposure of the subject. These images are often made up of in excess of fifty separate photographs, of different exposure, angle of view and framing; to gain the detail from the deepest blacks to the brightest highlights in this extremely high contrast scene. PhotoShop is then the computer programme of choice, for stitching the images together. This process can take days to complete and it is not uncommon for me to finish a new image a year of more after taking the original photographs.
Commercial work: After finishing College I worked as a freelance photographer doing portraits for national magazines, documentary work for others, interiors for a furniture manufacturer and obscure work for local designers.
Full-time teaching put a hold on this work but in recent years I've been involved in some interesting and trying commercial work. For the last two years I've been the official photographer for the Bideford Folk Festival; I've worked with Beaford Arts on documentary, music and design work for their website and promotional brochures, and Devon ArtsCulture have commissioned me to make promotional DVD packages to promote their events.
Photographing art for artists: I've also become increasingly interested in photographing artists work to make it look its best to a perspective client or gallery in digital or print form.