mix

Where do I begin my story how I became an accidental photographer, was it when I was a child watching my Dad use a medium format camera, referencing photography in my early figurative paintings, seeing the human condition and the planet we live in captured on film in newspapers and books or was I just curious to see what the world looks like through a camera in a fleeting moment.

Painting

My first love was painting and it always remains so but we went through a bitter divorce some years back. My early paintings were figurative and heavily referenced photography which most painting of this type had been doing over the past two centuries. Some may say traditional art practice has been ripping off photographers since the advent of photography while at the same time deriding the medium as something lesser. For me I began to feel I added nothing new to the photography I sourced in my painting beyond re-imagining the photographic images and adding some nice painterly gestures it was becoming illustrative and derivative.

The Postman

After deciding figurative painting had no further milage for me I took painting into the lab to experiment and analysis it in purely optical and abstract terms. To do the experiments I used a computer to generate the imagery which was based on vectors, paint was hand mixed from pigments and tones were calibrated and the work was executed without mark or gesture.

Flut

The intention was to replicate the manufacturing production line in the studio where an artist becomes the operator of a process. I was trying create a industrial aesthetic reflecting that since the advent of the  industrial revolution human making has been geared to the mass produced object that conforms to set standards be it a M8 threaded bolt, the Ford motor car or the McDonald's quarter pounder, why should art be any different. Repetition can be beautiful it is what we have become.

White Oval

To this day I sometimes still glimpse a painting that can still send a tingle up my spine, fire the neurons in my brain and jolts my heart but I cannot lift a brush to canvas anymore. Why, there are many reasons but the fundamental downfall in painting practice for me was its inability to capture and convey the world we inhabit today. Painting may or may not be not dead as many have speculated over the last century but for me the vocation has.

Video, 3D Animation and the Computer??

Whilst moving away from painting I started to invest my time in developing alternative image making. The reason for developing new modes of making was a result the changing needs in Art & Design education where I work.

Hallway Paintings : 3D Animation

Traditional art and design disciplines are now looking at the creative digital technologies and process to expand and reflect on their practice. These new approaches to creativity have lead me always back to the �still� as video and animation are just a sequence of still images and in 3D until it made into an object it renders itself as a 2D image.

The Swimmer from of The Age of Unreason project : 3D Model

The Dancer from of The Age of Unreason project : 3D Model

Still from fluid dynamic simulation animation

Besides exploring the new opportunities of digital video editing, 3D modelling and animation software for myself and students I have been heavily involved with digital imaging. For me digital imaging took off with affordable archive inkjet printing, better colour management tools, cost effective large format scanning and computers and software that could handle large files and this started to happened for me about 12 years ago. So here I stand today by chance and good fortune with camera in hand starting out all over again.

Photography

Photography is a chameleon and has no allegiance to any discipline through some try to hijack the medium and claim it as there own but thankfully it just shows continued indifference to their ownership. The inherit transient nature of photography in capturing a temporal moment is very appealing, looking at the world through the gaze of the viewfinder as the camera focuses on its subject.

Boats

Journeys Path

My current practice has two main streams. The first stream is my scholarship at Loughborough University that over the past two years has been the designing, building and use of a 20" x 24" ultra large format camera, further details of this project can be found on this blog. The genesis behind the large format camera project was from a visit to the National Media Museum in Bradford some years back and I had the opportunity to be given a tour by Colin Harding of the back room photographic archive at the museum. The collection of glass & film large format negatives and cameras made me totally revalue what I was doing, they knocked me sideways. The large format photographs had a hyper realism and a clarity I had not seen before even from high end medium format digital cameras. The photography collection had captured the often humdrum of human activity over the last two centuries but there was something magical about them, they moved me. The name of the original ultra large cameras was �the banquet camera� made me inquisitive at the potential performative and group involvement in the act of image making and it could become an event a celebration.

Windows

The second stream is my own personal practice which can be seen on my website at http://www-staff.lboro.ac.uk/~acbd. At the moment I am still in the early stages of playing with photography as my main creative and making tool and I did use the words �playing� and �tool� which are not often used in art education and practice these days. So far it has been about process and the technology as well as taking pictures. I am still finding my way in photography and sometimes there is no sense or reason in the photographs I take, just of seeing the world is like through a camera is enough at the moment and I will allow time for natural clusters to occur.

Make, Experiment and Play

When I learn a new creative discipline I never start with the theory or conceit, I always learn and create through making, experiment, curiosity, chance and most importantly play. Theory noting critical and cultural theory can be a good servant but a bad master, it can be useful in the later or reflective stages of a creative process, to test experiments and for cross referencing but for me at the start of the creative process it fails to inspire. Failure is one of the most useful forms of learning, one must never fear failure but embrace it which leads me onto history as a pivotal cornerstone of learning as without it how can define our present and change of a future.

The Fens

The Hunt

When I go out with my camera I am on the hunt, the hunt for that illusive image, the hunt for something new, the hunt for something from the past, the hunt for the moment, the hunt for the eternal. The hunt takes me to old and new places, sometimes I get lost, sometimes I get confused, sometimes I get frustrated, sometimes I give up only to find something I was not looking for. The hunt can be quite exhausting your eyes hurt from looking, your nerves on edge from anticipation, your mind overloaded from sensations, feet ache from walking, back twisted from carrying kit but heart full from journey. The perfect hunt is to find the unexpected in the everyday, beauty in the mundane, imperfect in the ideal, an essence of the world we live in.

Fox