Introduction

All photographs hold a fascination for me, and my concern is how the activity of picture-making can promote a stronger, more profound sense of relationship to the world in which I live.

The photographs on this site represent a selection of works produced over the last fifteen years. Each project has been made with deference to the subject that acknowledges its inherent potential for spectacle or the mundane, and a desire to be fair and honest in that regard. Some work has been exhibited before, including the ‘Natural Order’, ‘Oxleas Wood’, and ‘Signs/Shadows/Residues’ projects, while ‘Anatomy of a Building’, and ‘America’, are still being developed.

I have been loosely described as a ‘landscape photographer’, but feel uncomfortable with the prescriptive connotations this phrase still carries. My work comes from a tradition of photography that avoids rhetoric, where the social, political, environmental and psychological aspects of locale are only implied, or acknowledged as the inevitable traces of our physical presence in this world. I have little patience with the arbiters of taste who promote the artistic or aesthetic merits of one system over the perceived deficiencies of another. Each image must be considered in the context for which it was intended. Thereafter, tangential analysis - while fashionable, interesting, informative, or impressive - can be only speculative.

I concur with the words of Robert Adams. “At our best and most fortunate we make pictures because of what stands before our camera, to honor what is greater and more interesting than we are. We never accomplish this perfectly, though in return we are given something perfect--a sense of inclusion. Our subject thus redefines us, and is part of the biography by which we want to be known.”

Peter Massingham