About

I live in Faversham, in Kent, and I take photographs when the conditions are right. That usually means a long walk on my own, a parade, or a busy street on a festival day. It doesn’t happen every week. Some years it hardly happens at all, and I’ve stopped thinking of that as a failure.

What I’m looking for is hard to plan. A moment where something is going on and it isn’t clear what. Two people standing a little too far apart. Someone at the edge of a crowd, watching something I can’t see. I’m drawn to people on the margins of things, and to how a person stands more than to their face. I would rather leave a picture unresolved than explain it.

When it works, I stop thinking about myself. I’m not the one being looked at. I’m just paying attention, and that is most of the reason I do it. The photographs are a record of having paid attention.

I learned from looking at other people’s books: Roy DeCarava, Mark Steinmetz, Alec Soth, Bryan Schutmaat. I can see their influence in my pictures, and I’ve made my peace with that.

For years I put these photographs on Instagram. This site is where they live now. There are no likes or followers here, just the pictures in the order I took them, and a few longer stories with words. Most are made on a small Fujifilm camera. Some are made on whatever I had in my pocket.