When I lift my camera to my face like Alice my looking-glass opens a world of difference and wonder, of possibilities and curiosities, where everything seems a little peculiar. I have always been fascinated by photography, the permanent record, the camera never lies, life through a lens.
I love the dark stark depths of black and white photos as well as the warm washes of sunlight colour that spring out from the page as if they were real. When you move the point of focus within a frame, like the human eye, it can re-balance the banal within the hierarchy of the beautiful. Looking back on photographs, when you develop them or process them electronically sometimes months after the event they snatched is a strange time-shifting experience.
As a child I saw my pocket camera as an extension of my dreams, my unreal slip of reality. But sometimes the result, when printed, fell short of the image in my head. It was as if there was an alchemy, sometimes the magic worked, other times I could not capture it. In time my camera and I became friends, it I treated it with trust and care, it would reward me, and sometimes surprise me.
I wish I could paint, or draw or compose and create beauty…but with a camera in my hand, my eye squinting through the viewfinder, I know that I can look at beauty in my own lop-sided way and bring others to the brink of my window to see…
orgoh 