No. 4103069 in UK He sells photographs of the surreal and of alternative realities (including images made with an InfraRed sensitive sensor). I first became seriously interested in photography around 1978 at University in Australia. One of my friends lent me his camera - and I rapidly invested in a 2nd-hand Olympus OM1 and some lenses. I became a keen camera club member but even at this stage I re
belled against the prevalent idea that "art" photography had to be monochrome - I found the most interesting images were in colour, in glossy fashion magazines and TV adverts. I went on a colour darkroom course, which taught me how to control contrast in Cibachrome prints with lith masks - and, therefore, how to manipulate colour images in surreal ways. The roots of my current "alternative reality" pictures were laid 30 years ago, well before I discovered Photoshop; and, even now, I try to produce images as much as possible "in camera" - using, for example, fisheye lenses and sensors that are sensitive to infrared light. I came back to England and gave up serious photography to work on computers in banking for about a decade. I dropped photography partly because the world was awash with images and I didn't see much point in adding to the chaos; also, I didn't know anyone to share non-representational art with anyway - and then a camera club judge told me that a colour print of a manufactured image (all sandwiched lith masks and food dye) was "very clever natural lighting"....
I returned to photography when I discovered digital cameras, Flickr and the Royal Photographic Society. I like working in Lightroom (it feels more like a darkroom workflow than Photoshop does), as this means that the limiting factor for my images is now my imagination, rather than the physical limitations of film and the time needed to deal with them in the "wet darkroom". Flickr and Facebook give me feedback on experimental images from a worldwide community with a huge range of photographic and artistic experiences. Getting my LRPS and ARPS distinctions from the Royal Photographic Society gives me feedback from photographers I know in person and trust - hopefully, they help me avoid mere self-indulgence. I'm becoming profoundly uninterested in photographic records of pretty things (although I'm still interested in capturing ephemera such as graffiti, stage performances and flowers - and take the odd landscape to keep my eye in). So, what is my personal photographic vision (other visions are available, of course)? Well, I like to explore alternative realities (where "reality" is what we think we see in front of our eyes when we look at the "real world"), the "neverwhere" in the title I chose for a public exhibition I mounted (see http://www.blurb.co.uk/my/book/detail/3047558). I'm fascinated by the idea that surreal images exist "somewhere" in front of the camera lens (I'll take out extraneous stuff and highlight parts of the image or tonal range but I won't usually add things). So, they're not purely imaginary (as a painting might be), they are patterns of real-world light that people can see "anywhere" - if they're prepared to. Humans don't see reality through a camera, they see it through a fuzzy-logic extension of the human brain - literally, as the retina is specialised brain-matter. Which means that I can use the camera to create alternative realities for the viewer - if the viewer contributes some imagination and effort.
