
Sailing away from North Wales on a boat, sometime in the middle of winter 2005/2006.
So I’ve got thousands of photographs from the past five+ years to sort through and get in order and I’m finally doing it. They come in the form of negatives, scans, undeveloped films, digital files, discs, hard drives and prints. Some are snapshots, some are for University projects, some are for exhibition and the majority are of my main practice – photojournalism and documentary photography, documenting my life over the past almost-decade.
One of the things I am really unsure of about my work has always been how chopping I am with my style. I say it’s experimental but I know it’s actually a huge turn off to have no fluidity to your work. It’s something I recognized in my work and how I work. I’ve dabbled in most or all aspects of photography: fashion, fine art, band/music, commercial, overly-photoshopped, minimal, abstract, grainy, clear, well-lit, badly-lit. You name it, I’ve tried it.
So on review of these photographs, all three trillion of them (well, that’s how it feels), I’m getting a bit more comfortable with my development.
I started off as primarily a landscape photographer. I grew up in one with most scenicly beautiful landscapes on my doorstep and taking day trips throughout Northern Ireland I picked up on how to work a camera. The first photographer to ever inspire me was Annie Liebovitz (cliché, but to this day she’s still one of – if not my biggest influence). It wasn’t her portraits that initially drew me in, it was her landscape work. With her leading the way, I began to dabble in portraiture and so and so forth. When I went to the University of the Arts to study photography, a part of me abandoned my roots in photojournalism, basic portraiture and landscape to take up ‘conceptual photography’. I think that threw me off and over the past few years my work has, for me personally, frustrated me and made me feel like I’d lost my edge.
So, as I’m sure it’s obvious where I’m going with this, the bottom line is – I need to get back to my roots. I’m a photojournalist. Sure, I can dabble in fashion and work some decent portraiture for editorials. There’s still no harm in being a fine art and conceptual photographer too, but I need to keep working on what feels more natural. I can appreciate conceptual photography and I will continue to use staging and layered meanings in my work, but it all started out focused on the visuals and that’s what I need to re-kindle.
So bare with me, there might be a lot of oldies, but what better way is there to return to your roots other than going through the roots themselves.