Who:
I am an Absurdist who makes playfully serious, optimistic photographs offering an ironic perspective on modernity and the human condition.
What:
I photograph places, objects and people.*
However, I tilt my lens towards paradoxical subjects because they mesh beautifully with my tragicomic worldview:
The importance of unoriginality, the humanity within consumerism, the intelligence in emoji, the exclusivity of art, the serene indifference of nature, the rewards of indecision, the brutality of colour, the strange allure of disaster, the empty ambition of cities, the vitality of death…
*People are terrifyingly beautiful and must be photographed, even though exacting that injury often feels like a betrayal.
How:
Start with the world and whittle it down. What a reassuringly subtractive process photography is! Chapeau to the painters who confront a blank canvas daily. My mind’s aptitude for pre-visualising flattened photo permutations makes me an adept editor of the world’s flux and flow.
Negotiate with the camera. I love photography’s fettered freedom—the camera doesn’t care who I am, where I have been, or what I think. Complete freedom is not freedom. Stockholm Syndrome: my captures are like freed hostages.
Persuade the camera’s unthinking, unblinking optics to compress monstrously ordinary moments into expansive images. Teasing ideas into pictures is not easy-peasy lemon-squeezy: the medium’s forte is mindless description, and its foible is blindness to the operator’s intention. Keep working; wear the camera down.
Devour other artists’ work with the glassy-eyed, hollow hunger of the pomaded diner in Robert Frank’s 1956 photograph, ‘San Francisco, Cafeteria’. I look backwards to move forward—my pictures don’t come from a void! They are metamorphosed core samples through all the images I have seen, from cave art to Oli Epp.
Select irony as my operating system. I am for an art that keeps the viewer hopping from foot to foot, from one electrified reality rail to another.
Slow screen-scrolling-thumbs by simultaneously seducing mind and eye; imagine a fire station on fire. Exaggeration and deception are my bedfellows, and I plump the pillow of doubt.
Make nothing final; resist resolution. The best conversations are open-ended, and I intend my pictures to stay that way. Artists don’t own the meaning of their work; meaning does not adhere to images, and you know it’s true.
Why:
I hear my father’s voice: ‘Make yourself useful, son’. Photography kettles my caffeine-fuelled ideas in neat, negentropic rectangles. When stacked, they form a chronicle, a response to his earnest request.
The camera is incredible. Wait—has someone invented a portable distancing machine with a pause button? The world’s chaotic, swirling complexity is like a murmuration of starlings—it can only be grasped by stepping back. And the ability to still the swirl? That has become a thrilling, dopamine-fuelled addiction.
The camera is a bully. At age twelve, I looked through my first roll of thirty-six-pics and cried, ‘The camera has betrayed me!’ I needed to get even. Being disobedient makes me feel ungoverned and lightly liberated.
Art forms the third corner of a triangular conversation between two people who will never meet. I feel a pleasurable Oxytocin—wh-whoosh— if my work is appreciated; that is undeniable. I haven’t made this resourceful archive only for myself. I want to please, but I am not eager to do so. Admittedly, what you see here is an oddly ambivalent way to forge a human connection, like the push-pull of an avoidant partner seeking love—but from a safe retreat.
Photography encourages me to think critically. Clicking away is as easy as drinking water, but making effervescent pictures is as tricky as bottling it. And, I enjoy thinking… in the way that thirsty people enjoy drinking.
Framing the follies of the 21st century is something this medium excels at. Why? Because it is riddled with inherent contradictions—but also… inherits new ones from society. You know, like that Philip Larkin poem? They fucked you up, Photography, and now… you are my ever-evolving accomplice of choice.
What I have—and what I lack—makes me fit into photography like a pencil fits into a pencil sharpener.
Embracing absurdity through art is a way of clinging to the crumbling rock face of a nonsensical world. It involves creating purpose through deliberate action, observing the human condition with lucidity, and participating, with other artists, in a communal act of defiance against stasis.
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Each of my projects starts with a simple idea which unfolds into a distinctive series:
System. McDonald’s is an assembly line of calculated conformity—a queasy metaphor for modernity—mining nostalgia for a future it can market. If good taste is the enemy of art, McDonald’s is excellent art. And, like an artist, it exists in an existential quandary: it really shouldn’t be selling salads. I documented twenty-five commandeered English buildings, employing a Bruegelesque perspective and a Becheresque heuristic—beauty for the senses, satire for the mind.
‘When you automate an industry, you modernise it; when you automate a life, you primitivise it’. Eric Hoffer.
Conversations invites the symbolic vocabulary of emoji into photography’s realm. The ensuing duel of digital dualism is a wry visualisation of our abstracted online existence—an absurd microcosm where imperfect tools cloud communication, pictographs replace emotions, and things become non-things.
‘The world is a fabric we weave daily on the great looms of information’. Olga Tokarczuk.
Outthinking the Rectangle contrives a tongue-in-cheek institutional critique. It unveils the camera’s viewfinder, the picture frame, and the art gallery as ideologically charged spaces—far from mere inert image containers. And the art world itself?
‘It has been the special genius of our century to investigate things in relation to their context, to come to see the context as formative on the thing, and finally, to see the context as a thing itself’. Thomas McEvilley.
Hometowns presents a map of layered images made with a keen awareness of the paradox of originality. Each of my pictures holds traces of others, asserting that new art is a metamorphosis of the past. While the ‘anxiety of influence’ is considered ludicrous in Hometowns, the latent solidarity between artists is emphatically not.
‘Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos.’ Jonathan Lethem.
Your Nature reverberates with nature’s unreasonable silence. Lost while searching for ourselves, human hubris blazes dead-end trails, writing its legacy in rushing rivers. The camera’s hard fixation fossilises our soft, atavistic fascination with forests, fenlands and foothills. If nature is defined as the absence of culture, photographing it doesn’t preserve it; instead, it exacts revenge by eroding it.
‘Nature is always against us, knowing no meaning, pity, or sympathy. It is mindless and indifferent—the antithesis of ourselves.’ Gerhard Richter.
Two and Two games the camera, taunting its absurd offer of one rigid, disempowering, shuttered moment. Double decisions bring double trouble—but also the opportunity to crowbar my ideas into the gaps between frames—and tease conventional photographic rhetoric. One image is doubtful; a diptych is decisive; our choices define us.
‘It is precisely the obscurity of the box which motivates the photographer to take photographs. They lose themselves inside the camera in search of possibilities’. Willem Flusser.
New Colour Guide exemplifies the duality of vision: a dynamic interplay between sensation and cognition. My strategic use of electronic flash—a bi-directional visual sonar when paired with a digital camera—mirrors our eye-to-mind process. A green table, heavy with snow, tips to trace an adorably charismatic diagonal line; blood in the snow—violently musical. A family, a contagion of colour, bound to each other. I shock colour out of its cosy spectrum into sharp psychological events. We are chromatropic beings, evolved to see only what we need to see. Take the red pill—and let me be your guide.
‘The basis of colour lies in its inherent instability. Once you accept that you are dealing with something unstable, you can begin to understand how to work with it effectively.’ Bridget Riley.
A to B. B gives value to A. Light would be nothing without darkness. Through inky illusions of sculptural solidity, absence becomes unavoidable in this series of forty-two photographs, each taken while walking the ill-fated route from Newgate Prison to the gallows of Tyburn—a resuscitation of photography’s ironic connection with death.
‘Death not merely ends life, it also bestows upon it a silent completeness, snatched from the hazardous flux to which all things human are subject.’ Hannah Arendt.
City is a cave that echoes with modernity’s paradoxes. Inside the cave is a boat becalmed until the next deluge. Inside the boat is a camera, and inside the camera is a picture of a cave.
‘At any street corner, the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face: the stage sets collapse.’ Albert Camus.
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Keywords: Absurdism, Anti-art, Architecture, Art history, Assemblage, Biography, Capitalism, Catastrophe, Colour, Digital art, Diptych, Emoji, Existentialism, Flash photography, Flusser, Globalisation, History, Humour, Instagram, Homage, Institutional critique, Intervention, Kitsch, Language, McDonald’s, Memento Mori, Metapicture, Montage, Mortality, Nature, New Topographics, Nostalgia, Participatory art, Picture Plane, Postmodernism, Post-internet Art, Psychogeography, Pop-art, Sculpture, Serial Art, Social media, Surrealism, Still-life, Structuralism, Tableau, Technology, Text, Time-based, Typology, The Uncanny, Triptych, Urbanism, White Cube.
