Inspirations - The World's Mine Oyster

"Why, then, the world's mine oyster,
Which I with sword will open"
William Shakespeare

Just as the pen is mightier than the sword, so may be the camera. Whenever I point my camera at something and frame it in my viewfinder, I am trying to touch it, and feel it touch me...to capture its essence or an aspect of its essence, but also to imbue it with my essence. This is true of all my images, but never more so than when I find myself or place myself in another country or culture, and see another world through my twisted lens.

 We'll Always Have Paris, 2010

Travelling is not only a journey of discovery, but also of self-discovery, and in this it becomes a metaphor for the journey which is life itself. To experience a world outside our own, away from the mundanity of normality...to place ourselves deliberately in the unknown, and within that to be ourselves unknown, is to create a freedom which may be simultaneously powerful, seductive, and intoxicating.

And through that freedom, we may gain new vision and new perspective, both literally and figuratively. Iconic scenes, monuments and landmarks become more vital and significant when experienced directly instead of vicariously...and the intensity of experience which comes from discovering or immersing oneself in something or somewhere genuinely and completely alien, is such that we are often changed utterly and irrevocably through it. 

 Sugarloaf 2, 2011

The challenge, then, is to capture and record this intensity and iconography in a form or concept which creates a vicarious experience with a power of its own, which makes the record and enhancement of a journey taken into a journey itself for those who cannot and will not travel the same path. Through this connection and inspiration of memory and imagination, and in a physical or a mental sense, the image may become a starting point, a waymarker, or a destination. 

Inspirations - This Sceptred Isle

"This precious stone set in the silver sea"
William Shakespeare

Like the documents of decay which make up my Dis/Integration and Surface projects, many of the  other photographs I take in this country are studies in the power of nature, its capacity both to create and destroy, and through either process create a purity of beauty which is at once definitely aesthetic and indefinably metaphysical.  

Each image a captured moment, an experience, and each immediately lost in time, the record merely a substitute, a cipher for the experience. The moment becomes the stuff of memory, and imagination, without the possibility of empirical verification...the time and space changed irrevocably even as the shutter closes. 

And so the image becomes what it evokes. Recognition, recollection, inspiration, contemplation. The viewer experiences not the moment which was captured, but their own response to the record. The empty beach becomes their personal environment, the flower blooms in an imagined garden, the landscape creates a landscape of the mind. 

The captured moment is just the starting point, the catalyst for a reaction and the beginning of a journey. The image may be manipulated and distorted to create a more concentrated, distilled version of the moment, into which  we pour the water of our own emotion and experience. Every image is an imperfect representation of a perfect moment, and from every image, we create or recreate our own. 

The coast, landscape, urbanisation and countryside of this land, the power of nature shaping and changing them moment by moment, subtly and violently, creating images of beauty and evoking memory and emotion which at times are also awesome in their affective power, delivers constant ever changing inspiration for the mind and soul.

My photographs of 'this sceptred isle' are humble attempts to convey and catalyse that power. See the results at my portfolio site.