Blocks

""The inventory started in 1839 and since then just about everything has been photographed, or so it seems"

"Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire"

"To collect photographs is to collect the world." On Photography, Susan Sontag

In the quote on the opening page of the Galleries section on this site, De Kooning says "In art one idea is as good as another". To that I would add "one subject is as good another". The ostensible subject I have chosen for this series of images was a collection of crudely made galvanised tin drawers, part of a wall shelf unit; the real subject lies elsewhere, however. These are not images about tin drawers. In that respect they may as well be subject-less. They are about what a photograph of anything actually is or can be.

This is photography not looking out at the world but turned in on itself. It is photography about photography. It is about a mystery I have pondered for a large part of my life. I'm not sure I'm any nearer an answer than I was when I first started to attempt to unravel this mystery...

I humbly dedicate this series of images to the memory of my lifelong master in photography, Irving Penn, who passed away aged 92 in October of 2009. In my not so humble opinion he was the greatest photographer of the 20th Century and anything I may have learned about photography as an art form I learned, if not always too well, from his example.