The Marks of Man

Pictures are experiences for me, I have spent a lot of time in galleries looking at pictures, the eyes of those painted, the human look, the gaze. I would like my images to be the other way round. A look through my eyes, with my prejudice and sense of time. Give a sense of the time it physically took for me to revisit this place and make a picture. The chore of unpacking, setting up, keeping the dog out of the picture, getting out of the way of walkers and answering questions. Then in the end looking inside myself to make a picture in a moment of calm.

Landscape has been boiling inside me for 30 years of searching for its reason to be a relevant genre, rather then a decoration for motel and hotel walls. Its difficulty has been our technological success and an inability to understand, me included, that landscape photography should be a state of interpretation of the land, the understanding and projection of the thoughts and ideas of the photographer, through the images. Whenever I walk into a book shop, it is almost with trepidation that look at the coffee table books on sale for the tourists here in New Zealand. Usual themes, blue sky, mountains in the distance, seascape with lighthouse. The images are good, high quality, professionally competent, but they say little to me about New Zealand, photography, the photographer and the audience.