PHOTOGRAPHY/ART

I take photographs because I have always found life to be a ravishing affair.  I am fascinated by people; I am entranced by the things that people imagine and produce and build, by that which  people have forever found beautiful.  I am in constant wonder at the sheer scale and scope and mystery of our natural world.  There, in every moment, is a world of sublime beauty and, for whatever reason, mankind has always, it seems, been impelled to freeze, to hold, to suspend, that beauty for the ever-eager eye and soul to gaze upon.  We need not know why we are this way, I suppose.  I think we glimpse aspects of our own, sometimes neglected and dishonoured, souls when we respond to art in whatever form.  Indeed, Leonardo da Vinci asked what must have been a rhetorical question.  “Do you know that our soul is composed of harmony?”

Often our response to life is intuitive, emotional even, and therefore we can sometimes find ourselves lost for a way in which to express our recognition, acknowledgement and appreciation of what may seem, at the same time, to be an utterly new experience.  Helen Levitt, known primarily as a “street photographer” said, “Since I’m inarticulate, I express myself with images.”  And one of my great heroes, Andre Kertesz said, “Seeing is not enough; you have to feel what you photograph.”  I feel that the greatest danger to the soul is indifference; art, in whatever form, can propel us back into the maelstrom of life and feeling, into an excited remembrance of things that have perhaps been misplaced, but assuredly not lost.  Art, I believe, reminds us of who we are.