[b. 1963] architectural and landscape photographer
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[My] pictures are about memory and forgetfulness. The evidence is dissolving. Bones crumble; human ash returns to soil; teeth, sandals, hair, bullets, axes disperse into atoms and molecules. Footprints in the snow will be erased by the next storm. The evidence of evil, like the evidence of good, obeys the universal laws of entropy. Heat cools, matter disintegrates, memories fade. If we let them.
I don’t feel like I’m taking pictures, I feel like I’m just gathering them in. They’re all out there. I know where they’ll be; I just have to get out of bed early enough to bring them home. Like lost kittens.
Every time I show [my picture of a nuclear warhead] in a lecture, I ask people if they have ever seen a nuclear warhead and do they know this is what it looks like and everybody says “no.”... And as someone who lives in a visual world, a professional visual image-maker, I find that a bit bloody pathetic. I’m a bit embarrassed on behalf of my people that we never bother to photograph the fucking important stuff. The stuff that we are photographing is pictures of our girlfriends’ bottoms or all that kind of self-indulgent stuff that you see in a student degree show.
Mine was less a work of photography and more one of archaeology: peeling back the layers...
A picture that is ghostly and silent can be more eloquent and less clichéd than a “noisier” photo-journalistic approach and I have attempted to make pictures that whilst they are not “documentary” in the traditional sense, they are still documents, like forensic traces.
Part of this interest of mine in the sublime means that a lot of the artistic ideas that I'm drawing on partly come out of the photography of ruins.
