Photography has been the focus of my life since I started a career in advertising, portraiture and fashion back in 1996. I fell in love with meeting and working with people and highly enjoyed the collaborative process. When working as a commercial photographer I believe there needs to be strong lines of communication to optimise the best out come in realising the clients vision.
Complementary to my commercial background I am also an accomplished Skateboarding photographer specialising in documenting the performance art of transition skating and the associated lifestyle.
In 2013 I completed an M.A in Studio Arts at Sydney University. As a primarily visual artist, I benefited enormously from the challenge of working with words, studying the history of my chosen medium and being forced to articulate my own relationship to it.
Photography for me is about seizing an instant and making it into something permanent. It is also about deciding the fate of the light by controlling a series of parameters that interact to create a mood or atmosphere. You are recording the world, but also creating a world through your control of light.
I have a strong desire to manage the moment through my knowledge of the medium, but also try to stay open to the unexpected, to allow the living energy of my subjects to take me somewhere I could not anticipate. I suppose this all stems from my love of meeting people and the performative act of picture making itself.
I will never stop wanting to try out new techniques and technologies, because technical knowledge and artistry come together in photography. By temperament, I am restless and experimental, definitely not the type to hit upon a signature theme and turn it into my ‘brand’ as an artist. All the same, I’ve become aware that there is a kind of ‘project’ implied across all my personal work, one that comes directly out of my own experience in the world of commercial photography.
Commercial photography is about making things look ‘just right’ for the context. I understand that commercial photographers, for example, are expected to make photographs in standardised ways. I enjoy that kind of work immensely, which makes me a lucky man, but my personal passion is to capture the unexpected beauty of things that do not conform to the standards, that are beautiful because they are in some way ‘just wrong’, The limitation of standard images of beauty is that people don’t really need to look or engage with them in any depth, because they are offered exactly what they expect. I hope visitors to my site will find plenty of what I have asked them to expect: the unexpected.