photography

‘I am neither of the East nor of the West, no boundaries exist within my breast.’ ~ Rumi

I was taking a lot of long walks on Dartmoor initially recording images/videos by Smartphone (see below) before investing in a camera to explore the potential of combining my love of walking in nature with the curious idea of emptiness as a photographic subject. I grew up in the Teign Valley and have developed an interest in the symbolism of the river: how it’s evolved in a personal sense over the years (a place we used to swim as kids, party as teenagers and find quietude as an adult) as well as how it appears as a universal metaphor in other cultures (e.g. Taoism and yin-yang). I am also drawn to the mysterious beauty held in the asymmetric textures and patterns found in nature, especially trees. Aiming to synthesise form and enigma, I take a notepad with the intention of complementing each picture of various scenes through the written word that orientates from ‘bracketing’ in phenomenology: attempting to describe the scene in the moment in as rich detail as possible but avoid interpretation or adding any kind of feeling. I then type up the raw text out of which I create a haiku or short poem to accompany an image from the walk, which sort of mirrors the technique of shooting an image in RAW before post-processing. For now, I am allowing this project to develop, but I like the idea of exhibiting a series of photos with accompanying haikus. In the meantime, I am sharing a selection of work on Flickr.