AfterLife

What I find fascinating about photography is working ‘in camera’ to create altered realities. This happens quite spontaneously while engaging in the ‘taking’ process or by purposefully pre-visualising and ‘building’ the image in my mind and then in reality using the camera to explore the idea. In my new series AfterLife, I have used creatures that have been alive, a reality we rarely ponder, and worked with their redundant and beautiful forms. I have applied techniques and limited the post-production to the very minimal ‘tweaking’ of contrast, clarity and colour temperature in order to create innovative images. My fascination has been in taking something beautifully ‘made’ by natures hand and analysing the anatomical detail, colours and textures within each body. By drawing attention to these wonderful and often minute beings we can appreciate unexpected prehistoric references in their physical details and an extraordinary presence and expression in their unique postures, partly created in the moment of death. Photography by its nature bridges this gap between reality and our imagination. By creating frozen moments each narrative is alive with animated characters that boldly own their space within their frame. The project has not developed out of some macabre delectation but out of a desire to change perception and pose questions in the way, Leonardo’s incredible drawings from nature and Durer’s ‘fantastic’ Rhinoceros drew to our attention natures engineering of the creatures that share our world.