Roger Whitfield - photographs

Born in rural NW England, I moved to Wales in 1974, and from 1986 worked as a designer-maker in wood. I'm a self-taught photographer, though each of us may draw on the zeitgeist and what has gone before and bring our own consciousness to bear. Making images might not be necessary to life, but can be a meaningful practice and exploration.

In July & August 2006 I had a show at Aberystwyth Arts Centre, and later at Theatr Clwyd, of 50 colour prints from film originals of the Welsh mountain Cadair Idris and its environs that I called ‘Something of the Land’. The same year, nine images from the same portfolio were shown at Norwich Castle Museum / Art Gallery alongside their exhibition ‘Art at the Rockface'. As a private project I designed and sent to print a book on Cadair Idris, and gave copies away to friends.

My photographic attention is quite simple and tends to be towards what's fairly close-to. This is how I naturally look, but is also a form of abstraction from the undifferentiated clutter of the world. I'm alert to natural and built surroundings, inhabitable spaces, traces of human activity, and with ambient light – how it falls, and how the forms and textures of the world receive it.

Light, like music and life, is both in and of the moment, and there can be a visceral immediacy in our emotional response to its passage and what it touches and reveals. A photograph marks both its presence and its passing.

I'm also curious about connections between subjective experience and how it may be communicated. How we see and what we recognise may be tempered by our cultural background, whilst we all share a common humanity.

It's been said that the aim of art is to represent not outward appearance, but inward significance. Maybe photography as a medium can achieve something of both at once.