I’m a musician, writer and photographer living in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. As a photographer, I began by documenting what I thought of as “slices of our world”—mostly landscapes, flora and fauna. I was looking for images that froze the world and gave the viewer a sense of how it was. You can see some of this work in “Older Collections” on this site.
After a while, though, I began to feel there had to more. I began to explore and experiment with a number of directions attempting to push beyond this “documentary urge”. I think of these as searching for a more interpretive element in my photographs. Over the last while I have begun to:
Photograph everyday places in ways that revealed them in new and different ways (see “Victoria” in “Newer Collections” which employs high contrast, black and white infrared photography to highlight the lines and power of local structures);
Explore the changing moods of local places by rephotographing specific locations as the seasons turn (see “Straitscapes” where the focus in on the Strait of Juan de Fuca);
Create images that explicitly tell, or at least imply, stories (see “Intrusions” which tell of the battle between man and nature as it’s being played out in our local rainforests—I tend to favour cases where nature is winning….);
Experiment with post production so photos have a less documentary feel, rendering them more like paintings or illustrations (see “fooling around…”);
Capture rare and special times in the local world (see “Winter” in which the images reveal an unusual moment in our region);
All of these are works-in-progress as I try to push beyond the documentary. My work can be seen as caught within a tension between the “documentary” and the “interpretive.” While presently, my push is toward the interpretive, the urge to capture a meaningful documentary image still remains…..
If you have any questions or are interested in purchasing any of these images please contact me here.