Not just Black & White

Since I started this blog just a touch over a year ago, I seem to have got a reputation as a black and white photographer. Mainly I think because my current main project has been in done in black and white, as was a major one before that.

But in fact, up until those two, I hadn't used black and white as a major part of my work for a long time (although it was what I started off with - learning to process at 14 years old in our blacked out kitchen was a lot cheaper using Ilford HP5... and much of the early work I did in the UK - photographing post-industrial NE England was all also done in good old HP5. But after that, most of what I did was actually in colour, with the odd foray here and there back to the darkroom and enlarger.

So here is some work from peripheral vision - The Yellowknife Project. The last bit of this was done in 2005:

"the suburbs as a state of mind...

There no longer appears to be a clear division between the suburbs and either the urban or rural environment. There now seems to be a generic suburban condition that may be a potential quality for all inhabited spaces. This extended suburban condition does not easily show up on maps, it is in many ways more of a suburban state of mind than a topographic location...

In photographing this I find myself looking at things that are somewhat off centre, off to the side - a peripheral vision. Things that are often unnoticed and just below our level of perception. Things seen that are in plain sight yet so familiar or obvious they are usually ignored, unseen, and their existence barely registered - attention no longer paid to them.




This project conveys everyday North America and the infiltration of the city by suburban culture - the place seen on the way to the office or the supermarket - viewing these familiar environments from an off-centre perspective, revealing the ambiguities and artifice of everyday life.".