A little bit about me

Although I'm doing a lot of photography at the moment, I don't consider myself a photographer, but rather I use the camera as a tool, the majority of the time I manipulate it to achieve a style or an effect that I want and very rarely use it in a conventional way. I guess it comes down to me being a frustrated painter, as I don't have a studio at the moment, yet, saying that I very much enjoy photography, the technical side of things is still a bit hazy but I think I'm getting there.

My recent work has mainly evolved around the concept of photographing or documenting not what I can see, but what I can't, developing a technique with the camera to pick up moments which bypass us but because of the nature of the photographic process the camera is able to pick up and record for me. Working in this way can be very frustrating at times, because (particularily working on 35mm) you don't know what you will get and I've had countless rolls of film come back completely over exposed and ruined, but I guess it makes it all the sweeter when you get an image that is perfect and completely unexpected.

I'm currently working on a project around the theme of Personal Daemons, inspired in part by the work of Francis Bacon -- an artist who has always intrigued me -- particularly the way that he views the world and how he translates this on to the canvas. He once said that "you can't be more horrific than life itself" -- and I take that to mean the good and bad that resides within all of us -- our very own personal daemons. These inner daemons come in many forms, the most common interpretations being psychological problems such as depression and schizophrenia -- disorders that can completely dominate the sufferer's existence, and there is no escape from it, but they can come in many forms, addiction being another prime example. My main aim is to translate visually my own personal daemon and the impact that it had on me. The project in it's present form is largely photographic stills, but I now have begun to explore the possibility of bringing it to life, using the same kind of techniques and stop frame animation.

As you can imagine this is going to be a lengthy process, I plan to put up some documentation pretty soon and some test 'films' I've been working on.