The dead and the living. The ever-the-same and the ever-changing. The static and the dynamic. Most battles are fought to fend off intruders, invaders into what is thought to be someone else's space. It has always been so, and this battle is no different. This time, it's not man against man, but man against earth. Because this place is not ours. It belongs to itself, and mankind has used it and abused it since the day some bright spark lit the first fire. I will not go into the controversy of what we've done wrong or right - that is not my intention. My focus is on the fact that this conflict does exist, and in which ways we can look at it.
The premise is this - it is a battle we're never going to win. If we look at what man "creates", we see the static, the dead. I see a building today - same building tomorrow. By comparison, I see a blade of grass today - it's a flower tomorrow. Nature is alive, dynamic and ever-changing. It is self-sustaining and self-healing, and this is it's greatest weapon. We might not realise it, but we are just a speck in the history of the universe. A little bit like a flu or an itch we might have throughout our lifetime.
This thought fascinates me. From our point of view, nature's healing process is irritating. We build, it destroys, we create, it disintegrates. If we look at it from the opposing point of view, however, it very much resembles the actions of parasites and antibodies. We destroy, it heals. As they say, it's all a matter of relativity. What we see and what we believe depends entirely on our point of view. What we see as decomposition from our point of view is recomposition from nature's point of view.
I have always felt close to nature, and decay has always fascinated me. It has a visceral attractiveness - a stunning elegance under a veil of harshness. Since the day I grabbed a camera in hand I found myself photographing things that are falling apart. I find it interesting to observe and beautiful to look at.
The "Recomposition" series is an ongoing effort to document and interpret the beauty of decay in all its shapes and forms. As with all of my work, it is a collaborative effort - I will not stop at documentation, but rather use what I see as my starting point, building on it until I have uncovered the beauty I see in it for everyone else to enjoy.
During the 1920's and 30's, Alfred Stieglitz photographed a series of clouds. He called them "Equivalents". This title was based on discussions which often emerged at Gallery 291 in the previous years. They stemmed from Kandinsky's theories, particularly the belief that colours, shapes and lines reflect the inner self, the emotional "vibrations of the soul".
Over the years I have been searching for that inner self through photography - a search which I know will never end. I believe that allowing instinct to play a major role in the photographic process is key in the creation of a free flow between the inner self and the photograph.
This instinctive photography features very strongly in my work, both at the capture stage and also at the post processing stage. In this set of images (which will certainly continue to grow), I try to explore the "soul" of my surroundings, and my own, through a technique which on one end creates a layer of abstraction from the physical manifestation of things, and on the other end creates a collaboration between myself as a photographer and nature itself, by introducing that unknown, uncertain, or "random" factor into the image. Not having full control of the final image allows for a connection with our surroundings that is almost tangible and certainly real.
See an interesting article on thethirdray.com
