Portraits

John Berger said that “what makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are time and light.” As a photographer, time is central to my practice. For many years I shot with film, which demands an element of patience. One needs patience when capturing a portrait — or any moment — just as one needs patience to continue photographing until the roll of film is finished, developed and printed, before you can see your photographs. Light is what allows us to see, and to photograph. Light lends the mood and feeling to any scene and determines how we perceive space. With experience, a photographer knows how to read light and how to use their camera to record it. I was initially drawn to photography for its ability to record a person’s humanity on film, and for the magic that happens in the darkroom as their ineffable spirit is translated onto paper. It is the ethereal nature of photography that speaks to me. And I respond by striving to make photographs in which the space and light in the image feels like how a poem might sound.