Approach

I’m not going to a place with a prescribed shot list of what I want to take a photo of and how I want to take it.

My approach is from the outset, involves a kind of relinquishment of my own authority.

I don’t want to be the go-between for the space and how the public considers it through the image.

Because that’s not fair firstly on the space, secondly on the person viewing the photograph, and lastly – most selfishly – on me.

I kind of don’t want that responsibility, because with it I can’t be the photographer or the image taker I want to be.

I feel as though I produce my best work for myself, so when I inhabit a space, the most successful set of images will be the ones I take for myself, and funnily they often end up being the photographs that resonate the most.

What you’re hired to do and what the client wants is a documentation of the space.

You don’t really have a choice there; you’re being paid in exchange for the production of a set of images.

What you do have a choice in though is how you document that space.

I hope I’m at a point where I’m being hired not just to set up a tripod, dial in the correct settings on the camera, take multiples exposures and knit them nicely together in photoshop or lightroom.

I hope I’m being hired for more, so rather than being inventorial in my work, I took a decision right before I went freelance full time to be more essayistic.

I don’t want to produce a set of images saying here are the spaces within this project, I want to in some way communicate that this is how I feel or I felt in this space at this time.

And I felt like that because of how the room was orientated, the specific light conditions on that day, the atmosphere during the moment that I decided to line up the frame and take the image.