Personal Work

Much of my personal practice oscillates between social documentary and visual metaphor, like a continual dance between the conscious and the subconscious. I don’t plan it that way, it just seems to happen, as one project opens avenues or reveals side alleys into the next. My influences are scatty and often incoherent, and reflect the butterfly nature of my own mind.

They certainly include artists like Ana Casas Broda, Elina Brotherus and Rinko Kawauchi, but I keep coming back to my photographic anchors, like Alec Soth, Parke Trent and Michelle Sank (who I am very fortunate to count as a tutor).

Cemre Yesil has planted a passion for making ‘things’ from photography, whether books or simply observing the actions of pigment across different surfaces (usually paper).

Beyond the visual, I’m drawn to works of particularity, which includes writers such as Richard Ford, Carol Mavor and the micro-histories of people like Carlo Ginzburg. This stems, I believe, with my great difficulty in studying history on the massive canvas of eras. For me, I needed to reconstruct the large from the very small and the personal. It also explains my brief dabble with social anthropology while at Cambridge University, and my continuing fascination with the subject (to which I’d add psychology) beyond my first university life. It is also why I became a journalist. I work best with people, not trends.