A camera, in essence, is a light-tight box with a hole in the front, a shutter, and a light-sensitive recording medium within.
I grew up using 35mm film. Eventually - well before my Aberystwyth exhibition - I got a film scanner and my workflow became hybrid, where I would scan the developed film, adjust the image tonally using a computer, and send a digital file to print.
Currently, though I use film occasionally, I’ve transitioned almost entirely to digital, all the way from image capture to print. But this is somewhat incidental to any core photographic purpose, even as it may impinge on the results ...
I came to see my photographs as a sort of visual diary - for myself, of course, since others would lack the context of associations that my memory provides. But hopefully, here and there something inherent in an image might transmit; a communication may occur.
Photography’s a cultural activity: a picture can be just a record, or sometimes more with a sensory and emotional presence all its own. It will embody a degree of maker’s intent, and there’ll be scope for viewers’ responses. What message is contained? What meaning might be assumed? The image can be a bridge, but once made, it is set free.
This planet, Earth, has its hazards and its mysteries - my feeling is that as organic beings we’re physically and emotionally wedded to it - being remarkably of it and meshed with its nature. But the universe is so thrillingly grand in its own right that it’s hard to believe the human race is vital to it. Our Earth will surely perish or transmute, and so may we. We are of the wilderness - that great gift that we inhabit, interact with - and remain dwarfed by, despite the Anthropocene.
Any notion that humanity may survive out in the cosmos by developing the technology to do so, to me seems a grasping at immortality bedded in ambition and the physical realm alone. The practicality of our species thriving on another planet far from home seems implausible to my naive mind.
Allowing that behind all that we can physically see and guess at, there’s a vast unknowable that we can never grasp - doesn't that make our existence here, and our consciousness of presence and process in each felt moment, all the more magical?
Maybe we’re eternal in ways that are beyond our mental scope to imagine. But perhaps to inhabit the fleeting moment is enough to serve for everything. Can we not have good intent and heart, and yield to the mystery?
Being mortal, we are as leaves that fall, and the younger of us in turn take human existence forward - what world is it that we bequeath? But it has always been thus in human life on earth, it seems, & we are less than atoms in the infinite: to see the stars & milky way, on a clear night in the country, can chill the breath with wonder, even more so as a child ...
We are flawed, though. But within it all as humans, we're able to access an inherent morality – implicit in our nature, curiously embedded in us. We can intuit its nature and truth, but also have free will and can choose to accord with or ignore it.
Societies founded on consumption and constant ‘growth’, where many of the products (and services) consumed are far beyond necessary, carry the implication that those involved in their conception, manufacture and distribution are engaged in what could be seen as essentially pointless tasks, except to bolster the consumption and growth first mentioned. The Industrial Revolution has a lot to answer for.
The anthropocentric aspect of climate change, if you subscribe to it, is linked with this. The world we inhabit contains whole nests of dilemmas. What to do, how and when to do it, in each individual life? What might be our motives, and how much agency might we have? Why do we do what we do, what and who's it for, what's its nature, what's its purpose?
Embracing our mortality may cast a light on it, even as we’re all immersed in the engine of life. Everything is to do with everything. There’s no escape.
If life is work in progress, we can at least strive to have principles - and if we’re lucky, find some delight along the way. A main thing, maybe the only one, is to be as fully conscious of the mobile moment as we can be, and engage with it in the best way that we can imagine. The now is the infinite. It is like this.
And photography? Just noticings and expression. Is not the world all one as we jostle in it, and everything significant?