I have spent a bit of time this year when it’s been quiet (don’t laugh!) to try and plumb the depths of what it is that drives me to write and particularly photograph the things I do. Before we go any further there is good reason to pair that down even further because what I photograph can largely it seems be broken down into two categories: the stuff I like and the stuff I like. Confused? Yeah, me too.

Ok let me try and enlighten. As I see it there are two types of thing I photograph: things I just like. There isn’t much too it, I see something I like and I take a picture of it. That’s the first type. The second type is subtly different but different enough to be quite different. The second type is something I like but have a complex relationship and emotional reaction to – meaning that what I have taken the picture of I like because of what it reveals to me, not because I physically like what I see. This probably makes very little sense so let me give you an example. A picture of a run down house. I don’t like the sight of the run down house, I’d rather it was a quaint cottage, but it’s not. I like it because is conjures a deeper emotion in me, creates a mindset, it allows me to peek underneath the surface of something that is hard to put into words. It’s almost something that reveals a super-reality, a sort of surrealist impression of something. Generally the second type of picture isn’t really in some ways all about the picture at all, it’s about how it makes me feel.

The thing is though I don’t know what I am trying to say, what message I am trying to give out, it’s just a feeling and this seems to be more than anything to be connected to things I reacted to as a child. And why I reacted to them then is an impossibility that I’ll never know the answer to.

It seems it’s these early experiences that I am sure just like everybody I find I am driven towards to explore and try and figure something out from them. On the simplistic level I am just taking pictures based on this and finding out more about these things now that I am older and have the capacity to be able to do so.

So what things? Well, bizarrely enough some people will work to exclude a pylon or a motorway from a picture but sometimes I’ll work them in. I don’t know why, but I remember being intrigued by pylons when I was little, and motorways, and just generally being on the move going out for the day sat in the back of the car. It was contrasts between those definitely urban and human forms against the natural landscape that they all cut through. Relatively speaking I grew up in rural Oxfordshire/Buckinghamshire (first Thame and then Haddenham just outside of Aylesbury) in those formative years so anything urban quite greatly contrasted with what I was used to. Especially as we were always visiting family in North West London, Ruislip and Watford are pretty different to Haddenham! And so was Milton Keynes…

In essence it seems that the second type of picture I take, of the things I like because they reveal something seems to be intrinsically linked to experiences and things I was intrigued with from a young age. As I have grown older I have been able to explore those things on a much greater and wider level and extend it to other things such as other urban environments I would like to photograph (e.g. Metroland (NW London – think Rayner’s Lane, Ickenham, Hayes, South Oxhey etc. or Thamesmead.)

This of course fights it out with my beloved Sussex and South Downs where I live; I am equally passionate about both and it’s just a tug of war between the two things all the time.

In my photography there seems need to be the sense of a journey or progression, of going from one place to another, or the passing of time. The feeling of being on the move excites me a lot, be that in the car, on the train or walking somewhere. Even the amount of times I have driven up to Milton Keynes for Impression Milton Keynes, I enjoy it every time, looking at everything, the motorway gantries and the aircraft over Heathrow, the feeling you get as the car bounces over the joints in a bridge at speed – the feeling of being on the move and things happening I find quite exciting, like an adventure.

Connect this all together and what you end up with enthusiasm, bundles of it.

I feel like I have only scratched the surface of what I am about when it comes to my photography, what I am trying to capture. And I think it’s best leaving that to the pictures themselves. Am I a surrealist? I would say no, but then I don’t see myself as anything because I just take pictures. I’d be inclined that I am trying to reveal something but I don’t know what that something is, except for trying to peel back the layers of feelings I had about places and things when I was little. I’d be inclined I struggle to communicate that in the photos and even if a drop of this was evident to a few people in Impression Milton Keynes I would be very very surprised, astonished even. They are just pictures, pictures of things I like and of things I like…