The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot’ - Werner Herzog, interview with Stephen Sackur, BBC Hard Talk, 20/1/15

Good omen or bad
Vapour trails mark a crossing
Through plains of exile

A taste of exile is the first step towards becoming a philosopher, or a photographer.

Photography as `the deciphering of what we are in the light of what we are no longer' - Marc Augé. 

`In the full light of day, a lamp in hand, he used to go about crying, “I’m on the lookout for a man”’ - Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Ancient Philosophers, writing about Diogenes of Sinope, cited in Anecdotes of the Cynics, selected and translated by Robert Dobbin (Penguin Classics).

Presence is light but cannot be foreknown
except by way of shadow. All is in the division:
how many nights does day need to be day?

On paper
brushed by shadow
things
have their being in light.

(From Heather Dohollau’s poem, `A Painter’, trans. by David Wheatley.
With thanks to Clémence O'Connor and David Wheatley.)

What greater symptom of a loss of faith than the purgatory of faux analogue?

The analogue

My first camera

My dual nationality

My third language

The death of a father

The birth of a daughter

My discovery of the North

The digital

When I photograph I try to hide something in such a way that it might be discovered by the viewer in a way I am unable to predict.