Very soon now we* will be releasing the first three films and a website filled with written essays, descriptions of this course of 12 films, 4 manuals and on-line discussions, pre-recorded talks by me about photography and interviews with other artists about their work and processes.
I have written 200 pages of information for the first manual reflecting in more detail the first three films, which will be sold separately online as a downloadable PDF for the general public.
You can see a short ad for it here.
In this work, in this thinking and articulating ideas, many reflections of my many different subjects, themes and content as well as styles of work have forced their way into my consciousness, and in particular into the question I now ask, ‘why am I now drawn to what I am now photographing?
When I now travel, without the central purpose to fulfil a commission or to pursue a specific story, I have a phone camera in my pocket which I ever increasingly pull out and use.
In the first three films I talk about how serious photographers, whether they are devoted amateurs or professionals, most likely will have at first taken a camera with them into the world and responded to things around them; that is, to begin with they were being reactive, perceiving something as attractive, odd or a particular interest to them.
At some moment they will have expressed a desire to photograph something in particular. Perhaps they realised they could help a local NGO or charity with good photographs for their website or recognised that their potter friend could use some photographs to help advertise her work, and so on. This is where they have gone from being reactive to proactive, this is when they begin to become an advanced amateur or a professional.
While walking around towns and countrysides I have come to recognise that I am attracted to subject matter, that I find wonder in the oddity or beauty of things and also begin to see similarities and interesting differences in objects, city squares, public monuments, social-economic detritus as parts of cities and towns left to poverty and ruin. Or I recognise how portrait worthy people are.
One such recognition has led me to photograph people in public places and especially people in public transport boxed into their smartphones, preoccupied, isolated, indeed alienated to all around them. These phones are the perfect tool to over emphasize the importance of the individual in society and to thereby atomise people, creating a world of ultra individualism in which ME has taken over from the importance and solidarity of WE. Something seeming so innocent has become a tool to destroy solidarity in the community.
The last paragraph reveals how one’s work, brought together in creative ways can become a commentary, a reflection, a position on human rights, on our wellbeing as neighbours, as playing a role in society helping one’s fellow humans.
This is coming soon, perhaps my mid June. Those people who are supporting my Substack financially will be offered the full highest tier for free of this course as soon as the films are released. If anyone wishes to support my Substack essays for the minimum of a year will also receive the project for free. To those who have supported me, thank you.
*’we’ refers to my around-the-world partners who are exposing this work to people in their cities, regions or countries.