memo

We made our way up the Orme in the depths of winter - a trio of kin, for a stroll around the wind-blown summit. We ambled about together for a while over the tussock-blitzed peak, staring at goats, peering through the windows of the shut summit-café and reading peeling tourist notices at the information-centre; then, when we could stand the cold no longer, we headed back to the car.

Earlier, when first arriving, I found an outlook over the bay to the mainland beyond; a distant group of rounded hills shrouded in low mist, and below me, a line of silhouetted telegraph-poles marching down to the sea. The scene seemed to encapsulate everything that I knew of the coast; of unpredictable weather, topography and distant childhood holiday memories deep-rooted in my subconscious. As the Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama once said: ‘the photographer projects a reality called memory towards the subject.’ This, to me, seems true most of the time, if maybe often unknowingly: a solitary fisherman, three chairs in a shop display, an underpass taken from a passing train, seagulls, souls... it is all the same.

When I consider the images in this book/series (taken mostly in England and occasionally Wales), I feel as if I was also sometimes unintentionally photographing scenes from old films, movies that I spent endless hours in my youth watching as inclement weather prevented me from venturing outside; fleeting moments of past cinematic-remembrances propelled into the photographic present, that would most probably have been lost to mine and most people’s selectively porous minds with the passing of time and progression of the here and now…

I pulled out a small compact-camera, and took a shot across the water; four years have passed.

The Orme – Llandudno, Wales – February 2016

destination ordinary

I found myself asking: What makes a place?

What separates it from a regular urban or rural landscape?
Maybe, I figured, it is those spaces that have ordinary ambitions…

It was just a hill, although a hill chamfered at one end like a giant pencil semi-submerged in the ground; it spoke to me of ancient barrows or military installations, or maybe a partly submerged submarine in a green swathe of ocean. Either way, it seemed to be more than just a landscape, to my mind it qualified as place. Passing through a tunnel of these places everyday, probably giving them scant regard as we amble through life; it seems to me that they make up most of our existence, and yet only a fraction of our awareness, satisfied only to loiter in the corners of our consciousness, like half-forgotten fragments of our particular reality.

In some ways place is indefinable; it will, I feel, depend on each person’s own cultural-history and upbringing, memories, personal experiences, events. To others, in another part of the world, images of place from elsewhere may seem fascinating or surreal, but to the photographer who took them they appear as nothing more than what they are; mundane, normal, commonplace, whereupon our own imagination then takes over; their only initial qualification being that they be ordinary…

muse

She is my muse; she didn’t ask to be, although she never complains – be it mundane hotel room, squally mountain, ethereal forest or thronged city, she is happy to oblige my camera.

‘Is my hat straight?’
‘Yeah, side profile please.’

Time and chance show their narrative – bw, colour, film, digital, it matters not. I call her Kes; it isn’t her real name, it suits her tho’.

‘I don’t like that one much.’
‘OK (delete), look up for me.’

She is sitting in the hotel lobby, huge art print looming behind her; like a still from a movie set I think. I observe her looking off to the left, watching the street outside...

'Hey, did you just take a shot?'
I grin, ‘maybe…’

Sometimes she obliges just a forehead or slumbering visage, a blurred smile, retreating figure or obscure Holga semblance; either way, they all add-up to a project that was never a project… at least never intended to be one. - She is my muse, my ever present subject… also conveniently, just happens to be my monogamous other

There is a land in the north… neither England nor Scotland, it supposedly straddles the border of both, (or at least once did); capital unknown, its spoken language - Cumbric, a form of Old-Welsh, its history blurred and myth-ridden; although the kingdom and its language are long gone, its identity is still strong; within the people, topography and place names.

In 2019 I began… two extended visits per year, to this none existent kingdom, plus various day journeys of tor and mere… it became my second home, the mountains and water, rural-verdure and stone of small town; its ephemeral, long gone self and neoteric-present. 

There was no point of view, no theme or story to be told, there seemed to me no need of one; to capture something no longer real, existence erased, was enough – to take my camera and capture Rheged.

'maybe Rheged embodies my wish to be in another-realm, a place not here’

In the West they speak a different tongue – land of Gwynedd Princes of old, of castle-ring… of druids and dragons…

Cymru (kum-ree) – Wales, most often as not north-Wales; I return sporadically, knowing full well that it is not possible to photograph those such as dragons and druids -

- yet feeling also that modern-Cymru has an intrigue of its own beneath the neo-skin of the present; knowing that history follows you everywhere, adhering itself to my camera shutter-button.

‘maybe Dragon embodies my wish to witness another-time, a past only imagined’