[B. 1959] A contemporary digital photographer from England
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Images ooze out of me like puss from a running sore.
Colour is everything, black and white is more.
The power of photography is driven by that unclear reactor which is at the core of us all.
Unless the truth be sinful it should not be possible to find fault with a man who views the world through a camera.
Art is not made by the wise but by men and women in search of wisdom and to search at all is wisdom enough.
My images are the companions of my thoughts.
We should not be photographing people because they are famous but because they are human.
Were it not for the pain to be found in the wider world I might not have sought sanctuary in the confinement of my own where I have discovered an endless supply of the raw materials needed to make the images I do.
I sometimes wish that I could paint badly. There appears to be money in it.
I am interested in the unseen and the obscene. An appreciation of the obscene leads to a greater understanding of beauty and the exploration of self leads to a greater understanding of others. Language is the limit of our understanding. Art is not.
Consider the thousands of years that passed between the time the first lines were made on cave walls and the glories of The Renaissance and, remembering that photography is not yet two hundred years old, I ask you to forgive my uncultured daubs.
I am not interested in recording what happened yesterday or today but what could happen at any time but never will. It is impossible not to be contemporary unless one has a time machine.
To see the light we must first acknowledge that we are in the dark.
Making art is like walking a very fine line. To one side lies indolence and on the other, the fear of success.
The fewer imaginative people there are the better I say because it leaves more room for me to run around in.
Leave behind on the fabric of this planet a pattern of yourself.
All photographs of children are disturbing because they are premonitions of us. A child is a tragedy waiting to happen, Man is the tragedy in progress. It is not possible to corrupt the young, to be born human is corruption enough.
Art is the exploration of the human mind by the human mind.
Art is often defined as the search for Truth and Beauty but I would define photography as the exposition of the fallacy we know as Truth and I might add that Beauty is measured in degrees of deceit, the greater the beauty the greater the deceit. Nonetheless, I am addicted to Beauty though unfortunately I am a habit that Beauty has managed to kick. It is discomforting to know that if only Beauty could be found then Beauty would cease to exist.
Only those completely lacking in imagination are able to confuse reality with its depiction.
In the Britain of today most of what passes for Art is indeed no such thing. Rather it is a ruse invented by the talentless to avoid manual labour which is, of course, an art in itself. The talented seek a means of self-expression in some imaginative form whilst the talentless seek solace in the norm. In Britain an imaginative man is an outlaw.
I do not choose to make my images. They choose me to get made. I make images for the hard of hearing.
It helps to get a handle on my work, if you are a lapsed Catholic with a repressed longing for reconciliation. Perhaps God bestows the gift of art upon those who cannot reach Him using the more conventional paths. Making art is the closest one can get to God without actually having to be good.
