I am a photographer and artist based in Cambridge, UK.

My professional life as global consultant in participatory development in Africa, Asia and Latin America is very intense. I see stunningly beautiful scenery – both ‘wild natural’ remote environments and managed rural and urban landscapes. I also see shocking examples of environmental degradation, waste and poverty.

Part the my motivation in my  photography is therefore political. Photography as a referential image, or series of images, can raise questions about the complexities, contradictions and challenges in the ‘real world’ in a way that other types of art do not. I am interested in images that are multi-layered. Landscapes that are changing and often manipulated in attempts to shape power relationships between people and groups of people and peoples’ control over and use of ‘nature’ and other resources. Street images and portraits that show relationships, or absence of them, and the ways in which people try to manage the world around them.

‘Simple images’ are generally inadequate to sustain attention in the deluge of ‘compassion/guilt fatigue’. I am interested in how to make visual messages understandable without oversimplifying from any one particular standpoint. In structuring and juxtaposing information to inspire people to want to think things through for themselves.

In order to attract and sustain attention I am also concerned about aesthetics and design, and underlying feelings and meanings – flashes of light darting across layers of reflection, fascination with transition states and half-glimpsed images as the brain attempts to make sense of random patterns and sensations. I am particularly interested in the power of suggestion and the process of abstraction and the degree to which images can be simplified in different ways for different effects and still remain readable to the viewer.

 Above all my photography is also a process of self-questioning, examining and trying to articulate my own responses and thoughts about what I see. Exploration of different ways of photographing, and different post-photographic interpretation and representation is also a way of examining and broadening my own understanding of a complex world, and my own place in it. And hopefully communicating my sense of wonder, sometimes anger, but above all questions about the only world we have.