About me and my work
After retiring from a career in the law I embarked on a number of courses to explore and further my longstanding interest in photography. This has led me to undertake a degree course with the Open College of the Arts, on the final module of which I am currently working. This site reflects some of the projects, and wider interests, that I am presently pursuing for the final stages of my degree.
My practice is primarily concerned with exploring temporality in photographs, specifically the extent to which photographs, singly or in groups, can contain elements of the Past and hints of possible futures. I am particularly interested in the relationship between Jaques Derrida's concept of Hauntology and photography, and to what extent it might be argued that photography is an inherently "hauntological" medium. To do so I am concentrating on landscape photography, rephotographing particular sites and places in and around my village, Stocksfield in Northumberland, that appear in old photos held in a couple of community based archives, and drawn from a number of other sources. This project, Stocksfield Rephotographed, provides a practical platform for ongoing research into this relationship.
The specific section on Hauntology is very much a work in progress and presently contains two pieces of work produced for my degree that deal with temporality and Hauntology, a literature review and dissertation. (For the time being these pieces do not include copies of the images discussed.)