Bio / Statement
Self-portrait from a biscuit tin camera, 2018. A self-portrait photographed with a self-made camera constructed from a buscuit tin. Photograph made at the darkroom for World Pinhole Day, April 25 2018. Animation created from an assemblage of individual contact-prints made from the paper negative.
When a family camera was placed in my hands as a child, I was immediately fascinated with this medium that « takes pictures ». I have since spent many of my years trying to understand what photography is, but more precisely what the world pictured in a taken image is. Does it contain captured reality, or is it as former MOMA photography curator Peter Galassi has stated, merely a « proposition of reality »? Or, as I have considered, do photographs form a new reality – a parallel universe that becomes activated as we look at them?
I first set up a darkroom in my parents basement at 12, became a photojournalist at a newspaper in west Toronto at 15, and won the Canadian high school photographer of the year award at 17. I was accepted to the photography programme at the Parsons School of Design in New York with a partial scholarship, but studied photography and new media closer to home at the Ontario College of Art, to continue my involvement with an Industrial music band I helped found – and went on to release several albums.
I dabbled in architectural and fashion photography, built kinetic sculpture with scrap electronics, and eventually became the Creative Director at a digital media agency. I later received an MFA in photography at the Edinburgh College of Art / University of Edinburgh, and am currently considering the pursuit of an DPhil.
My work explores photography’s interaction with the fabric of the world, along with the medium’s inherent suggestive nature of a narrative. I engage through the medium’s many faceted processes and materials, including photographs and negatives produced throughout the medium’s lineage. I am less interested in the here and now of photographs, and more interested in the shape of the universe formed through photography.
My work has not been widely published, is not in any major collections, and has been sparsely exhibited in North America, Europe, N. Africa and Asia. I currently live and work in London, UK with my wife and daughter.