As soon as I became interested in photography I knew I would be pursuing my own creative journey and wanted to produce photographs that were singular and surprising. The challenge for me even before picking up the camera, is how to take an interesting picture in yet another novel way.
For me that means how to make the ordinary into the extraordinary, and because my formative years as a photographer were before Photoshop, it generally, but not exclusively, means doing it without the computer.
Mirrors are a subject I keep returning to periodically because if I concentrate hard enough, there is always another permutation I can find in them.
I don’t just look in the obvious places for inspiration but in less considered places also, and one of them is the Crafts section of my local library. It has given me ideas and has helped me find solutions to visual problems I have created for myself. There you can find books on how to make lampshades, house painting techniques, quilting, wire jewellery and all sorts of crafts I have little knowledge of or not even heard of.
On this occasion I found a book on how to make decorative frames. I flicked through the images of exotically framed pictures and mirrors and before I got to the end an idea came to me. What if I made a mirror in the shape of a face and had a woman looking into it, what would be the effect? The only trouble was I did not have the prerequisite skills, the tools or the will and was too lazy to actually make one myself. It then occurred to me I could get around that by merely drawing the outline of a face on a mirror. A little after that, it also dawned on me that I could perhaps reflect objects in the mirror to create facial features, but what objects?
It was autumn when I came up with the idea and I thought I might try leaves and so I went off to my local park to collect some. Looking over my shoulder for park keepers, busybodies, and vigilante dog walkers, I pulled some from the bushes and thus my project began. [Official Website]
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