Collection
I’m an archival artist who collects other peoples personal photographs. Snapshots which have lost their original owner and become anonymous. I began collecting as a 12 year old in Oxford where I found an album of photographs from the 1930s, a young woman laughing with friends at a camp for Girl Guides. It was so full of genuine happiness, something so important to treasure which meant to much to the original owner. But what did it mean now it was on a table top in a rainy market? I couldn’t leave it there and so it became the first album in my collection.
Now 30 years later, my archive contains over 20,000 photographs, negatives and magic lantern slides.
Over time my reasons for collecting has changed and morphed. I’m interested in our relationship with photography and the camera today and through history. I look for real moments of real humanity not the headlines found in the news, but the small moments of countless lives which are the building blocks which make us who we are.
I also want to find real and true emotions in photographs, the emotions which have managed to hold on despite the sudden presence of the camera.
I want to find moments, compositions, stories which simply make me FEEL.
And I want to find photographs so beautiful, so incredible, that if they were enlarged and attributed to a named photographer we’d all gain so much from it as we’d give them the time and believe in it. But I want to present them without the name and the size, and still give people reason to stop and look. To give just the moment to look and really see and gain so much.
Write ups about my collection -
'FOUND' (book) contains a look at my collection through a visual narrative. With no words it links each image to the one before in theme or feeling. Telling the story of our relationship to photography, of emotions and what it is to be human. It explores my belief that found photography should be raised up and perceived as more than cute snapshots by amateurs.
