When I first started taking photos, I wanted to photograph the show jumping shows I went to. At university, I still took photos of show jumping, I shifted focus a little to street and photojournalistic photography. I also started to develop my own black and white film. I continued my street and photojournalistic photography when I came to London. Within a few years, I shifted to architecture photography as I became tired of either being told off or people playing to the camera.
Over the last year or so, I have been trying to figure out where my photography is going. While I am on the journey, what I am really tapping into my photography is the narrative. So, what do I mean by this?
The exhibition I was in during November 2013, much of the feedback that I received was people seeing their own stories and narratives within the photos I was exhibiting. I found it fascinating what people saw in the images – often things I hadn’t seen myself, or personal stories they had.
The images I showed were architectural, and so it wasn’t perhaps the most obvious subject matter to have narratives. What I found was that it invoked either people knowing the areas I took the images in and it provoked some memories or feelings of the area or it reminded people of other places they knew. The narratives were place based.
Seeing the narrative, and allowing the viewer to read their own narrative, has become more important in my photography.
I sometimes come across stories of areas, graffiti, etc after the fact. One good example is the graffiti image I took in Islington. It was a man standing by a utility box on the street. A number of months later, while reading the metro at Waverley train station in Edinburgh, I found out that the image was of the cleaner who removed some graffiti (Graffiti artist paints image of cleaner removing artwork). I appreciated the story behind the image, but for me, my narrative of the image was an office worker pausing while heading back to the office during his lunch hour.