I use photography to say something about us and our world - I create “visual essays”, I guess. I aim to exhibit my finished photographic projects in galleries - my images are simply a means of communication, so if people don’t see them, they lose their purpose.
When I started photography about a dozen years ago I simply took photos of things that caught my eye - landscapes, sunsets, people, animals, plants ... anything at all that made me look. After a couple of years I started to get bored. What was the point of my photos? What do I do with them? How many sunset photos do I really need?!
In fact, I almost gave up photography as a pointless pastime.
But then I got talking to an artist, and she saw something in my photos and persuaded me that I was going about photography all wrong. She told me to photograph ideas, not things. And she persuaded me to apply for an MA Photography degree - she said it would make all the difference. It did. (As an aside, the UK government subsidises degrees, so the MA cost only £4000 ($6000) - worth every penny!)
The way I work now is that something catches my attention. Usually not visual but a thought or fact - perhaps something I’ve read or heard. I may then photograph my thoughts.
An example is my
“Insecta” project. I was looking at a collection of pinned butterflies and moths in a junk shop, all rather tattered and faded, the labels faded to illegibility, and I wondered about its history - that someone long ago dedicated their life to these insects, but their collection was now meaningless. Not only had it lost all the information it once had, even the person who created it had been forgotten.
So, I decided to photograph my pondering: that we try to organise the world around us - for example in natural history collections - but this is doomed to failure.
I spent several months researching - reading, writing, visiting museums... Eventually I decided how to do this photographically. It would be a still life project of about 100 photos, of old collections I found myself plus collections in the
Booth Museum of Natural History - which kindly allowed me to explore their private store rooms. The end result would be gallery prints and an artist’s book.
The project statement that I worked to is:
The urge for humans to collect and classify is instinctual – a need to arrange the world around us into patterns, to form order from chaos. But time dissipates that which has been carefully hoarded; and it is this failure that fascinates me.
Dust and disintegration are the hallmarks of the fragments of insect collections depicted in my project “Insecta”. These creatures have died twice, first poisoned in killing jars, then turned by time into ruins. What remains are cul-de-sacs: their stored knowledge dissipated, their context lost.
Below is one of the 100 or so images, and also an installation shot in a gallery (the book is on the stand, and I created a sculpture too - a “cabinet of curiosities”).
