Each week I send out a short, fresh reflection from the road – photographs, sketches, and observations from old places that still have something to teach us. What follows is a moment from that ongoing journey.
"There are certain moments of looking at a familiar mountain which are unrepeatable. A question of a particular light, an exact temperature, the wind, the season.
You could live seven lives and never see the mountain quite like that again, its face is as specific as a momentary glance across a table at breakfast. A mountain stays in the same place, and can almost be considered immortal, but to those who are familiar with the mountain, it never repeats itself. It has another timescale."
WAYS OF SEEING
There are certain sun soaked days where I have to avoid the urban context. Through my work, I've become so fine tuned to the particular effects of light and shade on our buildings that, on long summer days after a day out in a town or city, I feel mentally exhausted. There's so much going on - so much to take in, to photograph.
When I'm on a commercial photo shoot, I stand back and look at the building and am able to imagine the movement of light around it and through it over a full day. From that light-map I work out my movements around the building.
Every now and then I sense the potential for a correspondence between light and shade, and the photograph above is an example of how light, shade and reflection can combine to make an interesting composition.
Here the decorative ironwork is positioned as if to create another lamp in a different dimension. It gives the photograph a depth beyond the simplicity of the subject matter.
When I'm walking around a place, I'm always looking out for little anomalies of light and shade.
I'm always inspired by the fact that, if we take our time to look, no matter where we are, we can observe interactions of light that are unique to that particular moment - never to be seen again.
More than that, taking the time to observe, feels like my little protest against the flakiness of current times.
Stopping and taking time to observe is an act of faith in the material truth that surrounds us. It washes away the fake news, discomfort and confusion of present times and helps me feel rooted.
Photography helps encourage a flexibility of perspective, it loosens my grip-like gaze of modernity and enhances my mental health and wellbeing.
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