Blue (2018)

I looked for you in photographs. The trace of you.

What can a photograph do? Can it really stop time, describe the world, record a fleeting presence and hold it forever on a printed sheet? When did I stop wanting to take photographs? Was it when I realized that no matter how many times I looked at a photograph of you I couldn’t feel you, hear you. That in each photograph you died twice.

So I stopped taking photographs and started making pictures, cyanotypes, writing with the deepest darkest blackest blue night to the palest whisper of a breath of blue.

Photography is about light and the trace and it’s also about time. Are time and love somehow the same, unmeasurable, a mystery? What are we looking for when we take a photograph, and what are we looking for when we fall in love? Does it so often go wrong because we try to shape it to some unresolved, unacknowledged fantasy of what it is we think we are seeing or want to be seen, and what it is to love and to be loved?

Blue is the colour of memory and of dreams, it’s the scattering of particles in the sky, it’s where I keep looking for you.

All images are from the book ‘Blue’ (coming soon)