“About me and my Work”

“I started taking photographs several decades ago when in my early teens and have never been able to stop since. The heavy expenditure of time, energy and money that serious photography requires have brought me more heartache than satisfaction, but it still seems magical and I see no alternative but to persevere.

“My hope has always been to produce photographs that stand as ends in themselves – not statements about issues or enquiries or windows on the world but things to look at rather than through.

“I have shown work in group exhibitions in galleries [including ArtsSway, Sway, Winchester Gallery, Winchester, and Forest Arts, New Milton, all in Hampshire, Photofusion, Brixton, London, and Fabric of the Land, University of Aberdeen] that are seriously dedicated to art but until recently I have not produced a sizeable, coherent body of work that I would wish to show the wider world.

“A person’s prior experiences inevitably affect how he or she feels about a work of art. This includes knowledge he or she might have about how the work was created. My pictures are made with a film camera and darkroom. What you see are the products of straightforward and well established techniques for silver-based photography.

“Images on a computer monitor are but ghostly intimations. In the case of the ones on this site, the tonal qualities of the original silver/gelatin prints are considerably degraded. Even more importantly, computer images have a very different presence – much diminished in my opinion – from a work mounted on a wall in a particular physical space.

“In other words, the print’s the thing.

“In a sense, this project is accidental.

“My family and holiday photos – a visual diary going back nearly 60 years – comprise approximately 9000 35mm colour slides. Wondering if anyone might look at these pictures when I am no longer around to set up a projector and screen – and finding this rather too much of a chore myself nowadays – I scanned the lot.

“While processsing the results, I realised that some of these digitized slides succeed as independent black-and-white photographs: the arrangements of their shapes, tones, textures and so on create strong, self-sufficient objects as well as records of what was in front of the camera.”

George quotes Gerhard Richter, the German visual artist:

“My pictures are devoid of objects; like objects, they are themselves objects. This means that they are devoid of content, significance or meaning, like objects or trees, animals, people or days, all of which are there without a reason, without a function and without a purpose. This is the quality that counts. (Even so, there are good and bad pictures.)”