Diptychs, Triptychs and Multiples

From almost the very start of my interest in photography, I have been making diptych, triptych and multiple-frame images. They are often not planned beforehand, but suggest themselves to me in situ when I am making pictures or present themselves to me later on the light box or the contact sheet – previously on film or paper but nowadays increasingly as digital files (which is sometimes, I find, less easily accessible from a visual or conceptual point of view, but that’s another story!). The idea is used to tell a short story, to show action or movement in the way of a mini film-strip, to re-order and re-present location and time. In some cases, the idea utilises aspects of photography’s own intrinsic double language, the negative and the positive, and the mirror image. Excepting the latter cases, all the composite images are made from separate pictures on individually exposed sheets or frames of film or digital files. The subject matter is deliberately not restricted to any one particular genre or photographic process.