Artist's Statement
Thank you for taking the time to visit my website. It's a place devoted to my portraits of remarkable Africans, and Africa: a continent which I dearly love.
My style of portraiture
In 2006 I developed my style of portrait photography within traditional communities, heavily influenced by the dramatic pictures of chiaroscuro artists. Chiaroscuro is an Italian term which literally means light-dark. Back then, at the very start of my Africa journey, I was buzzing with energy having met people of real magnetism just days into my trip. I was excited by extraordinary people and fascinating cultures and wondered how I could possibly communicate and express these feelings of excitement to friends and family back home.
The
solution, I imagined, would involve abstracting the remarkable from the not so
remarkable: put simply, I felt that the vibrant and intense individuals that I had
met in traditional communities would best show their magnetism on camera when
they were removed from the (often) dull and dusty backgrounds of their
immediate environment. After a few days I started to imagine each of these
people in front of me emerging from the nothingness of darkness, with no
distractions, hoping that this would provide a real feeling of proximity
between the viewer and the person in the picture. I made a conscious decision at
that time to leave a more documentary style of environmental portraiture to
others. Practicing this new technique in remote African villages in 2006 I had
nothing but sunshine and a hut available as a great ‘open studio': so I used
these parameters and started experimenting (I've never really liked flash
anyway). So it's simply the illumination of natural sunlight, and sun on dry
earth, that reaches into the darkness of huts and lights up these remarkable
people. Sun and dry earth are the only ingredients required for the lighting in
my prints. And of course, you also need to find exceptional people!
Falling in love with
photography, and the origins of this series:
I first fell
in love with photography around 2003. I had not been fortunate enough to
receive an art or photography education, but I knew back then, when I picked up
my first SLR camera, that I had found the perfect way to express myself. Every
time I had the camera in my hand I was looking to improve, needing to know what
everything and anything looked like once it had been through the photographic
process. It was a bit like a mad pursuit of alchemy - throwing everything into
the mix to see if any magic came out of the other side. The process of
photographic learning is very rarely a simple one, but to me it remains
beautiful: discoveries, experimentation and seeing for the first time how a
camera distorts and enhances the world.
In Africa I seem to have made it my goal to travel through some of the remotest
areas of the continent where the reaches of urbanisation and 21st century
living are barely detectable. Looking back, this wasn’t my intention when I
first arrived there in 2006, but somehow I keep returning to Africa to
photograph because I'm fascinated to encounter societies that are able to
survive in some of the most arid, isolated and difficult environments that
people have settled in. If you haven’t visited these places then the
reality of living is not nearly as romantic or idealised as one might imagine.
Life takes place against a backdrop of very uncertain resources and enormous
hardships, but traditions and hospitality towards outsiders remain intact.
I specifically chose to photograph the individuals that you see in these
galleries because I had a very real sense of wonder when I met them. Each one
of these people had something that attracted me, sometimes a piercing
intensity, or an uncommon beauty, that I felt compelled to try and capture.
It’s true that I photograph for myself, first and foremost, but a close second
is my desire to show others this magnetism that draws one into the eyes of
these fascinating people.
I have usually travelled alone or with a guide on these journeys, along the way
walking and hopping onto overloaded vehicles of every kind to head to remote
settlements. Often the destination is a transient, weekly market where hundreds
of vibrant, colourful people assemble somewhat incongruously against a dull,
dusty backdrop for a few hours. Later in the day they will all melt away with
their animals and traded possessions, until the location is again a patch of
bone-dry ground with almost nothing to separate it from the rest of the featureless
land that typifies much of the African Sahel. It is fascinating to observe this
process play out in almost exactly the same way across countless African
countries, many of which are separated by hundreds or thousands of miles across
this huge continent’s surface.
My favourite tools are sharp prime lenses and cameras that let you capture the
tiniest pieces of detail: whilst these details may be insignificant alone, when
aggregated I feel they help paint the picture of the environment and how each
person adapts to theirs.
My favourite series of work remains the Northern Kenya series which involved 6
weeks of intense travelling with my guide, Mo, across remote areas without a
vehicle and often without any semblance of an idea how to get to the next tiny
settlement. The trip was full of unique encounters in locations that seemed to
be famous, to me at least, as places where no transport seemed to be heading.
On one particular occasion we came across a lone Moran (warrior) emerge into
the dawn light, miles from anywhere. He seemed like a mirage: a vibrant vision
in pink cloth and bright colourful jewellery, and more acutely so when set
against the hazy yellow monotone of land that he emerged from. Even for
Northern Kenya, I thought he seemed to be in a remote, featureless location:
devoid of any water, and within an hour it would again be blistering hot.
Despite these uncomfortable realities - which clearly weighed more heavily on
my mind than his - the warrior seemed confident of his bearings and stopped for
a moment to exchange pleasantries with Mo and I. A couple of minutes later,
after sharing cigarette with my guide, he purposefully set off walking again,
to God knows where. This place that looked barren and foreboding, to me at
least, was clearly his home.