Embracing the Light

About the me and my work

I am a writer, photographer and software developer. They may look like three separate interests, but I don’t think they are. To me they are systems. Everything is a system in some regard. The world is one giant system, and part of being human is trying to understand it and find our place within it. Writers do that inwardly — cerebral, self-referential, trying to make sense of experience through words. Photographers look outward, finding moments in landscape, work and human behaviour that say something beyond themselves. Software does something different again: it imitates parts of reality and turns them into something useful. Writing software is, when you think about it, an extraordinarily creative act — producing something from what was previously nothing. Are those things separate? Well, are the sides of a cube separate, or are they joined along edges they cannot perceive? I spent much of my professional life as a cinematographer, but the photographs in this portfolio are not really my professional work. They are the incidental things that caught my eye when I happened to have a camera with me. Things that, for one reason or another, tickled my fancy. I like images that are stark and simple. I am also quite happy to subjugate literal reality when an image needs it. I use Photoshop not simply to reproduce what the camera recorded, but to recover the feeling I had when I took the photograph. Memory and experience are not always faithful to the raw file, nor should they necessarily be. Then I write. The words fill some of the gaps. Sometimes they explain what drew me to the image. Sometimes they follow an idea the photograph has started. Sometimes the image and the words head off together somewhere I hadn’t expected. Most people will probably look at the photograph and perhaps read a short caption. That’s fine. We live in a world that increasingly prefers the quick glance to the long read. But these image-and-text pieces are mainly made for me. They are a way of exploring ideas. And for those who choose to go a little further, there may be more to find.