This morning, I was telling a photographer friend of a thought, that lead to a revelation in my thinking. On Wednesday this week, I was back in the City making images, walking and thinking as I walked though the streets of the City, which lead me to the thought of why I felt I was struggling to make fresh images or to evolve my images, was in part that I was trying to make images that looked like my preconceived idea of what images should look like. The thing that had seen me approach photographing the City, differently to my past work was that I started the project with the idea that I would photograph what I saw, not what I thought I saw, not what I perceived as being the City, but what I encountered. To let the world itself, inform the images that I make. This line of thought, lead me to todays conversation with my photographer friend, about how young people make things new and I think this is because they are making it from new. Whereas, I have now been a photographer for a while and I have developed ways of working and seeing that informs and creates a style of working that is inherent in my own photography.

I think, it is important to be aware of how you make work, my images are my work. I have decided that I need to get back to first my principles of photography, to get the thing itself in the frame and concentrate on developing my active curiosity, that comes with active seeing. This is something that I felt I have been struggling with for a few months, as I have been distracted by trying to make images that looked like photographs. Images, as I have come to know them by other photographers, this is not then my own photographs, but the influence of others has influenced into my own approach. Now, I feel that I am back to myself and it is liberating. Lets see what I can do with this thought process and the rest of this year. I have till March 2019, on my City project, then it will be done. I will have photographed the lead up to the date that Brexit becomes a reality in the City of London. That is not what I thought I would be doing when I started, but it has become the mood music of our times.

The image below is an example of photographing what is there; I was waiting for someone and the light changed and gave me this opportunity to explore visually, moments before it had been raining really heavily so I was sheltering from it and yet a few moments later the light was wonderful.

Added later, After posted this i was reading the latest Source magazine on Art Photography and came across this on page 76. ” The enemy of photography is the convention. the fixed rules of the how-to-do,” So remarked László Moholy-Nagy in 1947.” It has always been this way we have conventions that get established and they hold us back from working to make new images, and we need to be aware of this.