This is the date where for the first time one of my photographs will be used in a commercial venture. I use the term ‘commercial’ loosely as I will certainly not be rushing to give up the day job! That being said I do feel proud that one of my photographs will be gracing the cover of a classical music eSingle, (digital download on iTunes to you and me), by the extraordinarily talented 17 year old cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason. I was lucky enough to be able to photograph Sheku at a concert arranged by my partner in October 2016. This concert took place not long after Sheku had won the BBC Young Musician 2016, the first black winner of this competition in it’s 38 year history. I hope I get many more opportunities to document Sheku throughout his career .
Why now?
I read somewhere that almost 2 billion photographs are posted online each day globally, mostly on social media sites. So does the world need another hobbyist photographer to join its swelling ranks in adding more landfill to the world wide web ? Definitely. What? Why? Well I hope to make photographs that in some small way explore the human condition in the world that we live in and in so doing I hope to discover something new to say. Along the way I hope to take photographs of interesting people in all walks of life, some supremely talented or with the potential to be so and others with just a story to tell. That’s not to say I won’t try and take photographs of the beauty I see around me. I most certainly will try but hopefully from an interesting perspective. I have too much passion and reverence for the history of photography both as an art form and vehicle for expression and of its great exponents that changed the way we see the world, like Henri Cartier-Bresson, Ansel Adams, Diane Arbus, Robert Capa, Don McCullin, Annie Liebovitz and Sebastião Salgado, (to name just a few), to not give my best. In homage to these great artists, I have always been and will continue to be a disciplined curator of my work so the landfill will only be added to in very small quantities and then only after a great deal of soul searching; I fully subscribe to the mantra that less is more. So getting back to the title, ‘Why now? As a History graduate that majored in 17th Century English History I believe we are living in revolutionary times both at home and abroad, a world turned upside down, and this violent fermentation usually leads to bursts of creativity; it stirs the creative soul. Mine has been stirred into action. GT