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Cameraman: Through different lenses

I remember the architect Moshe Safdie saying decades ago that he threw his camera away because he ended up seeing everything in a frame—and wanted to see the world as it was. While I sympathise, it’s also the case that carrying a camera can encourage you to look at the world with much greater attention than you might otherwise, or at least that has been my experience.

Over more than 40 years of photography, I have owned an extraordinary evolutionary sequence of cameras, starting off with a Box Brownie and then running through a Braun Super Paxette (which I borrowed from my father when six of us set off for Greece in 1970—and managed to mash up with a bag-full of prickly pears), a Leica M3 (which I bought from a German friend, Frank Stop, in the early 1970s and which Elaine sold at auction for more than I paid for it some 20 years later), a Nikon (AF/F-801), a Sony (DSC-F717) and then a series of Canon IXUS cameras, including one I was given by a Canon Managing Director on a visit to the company in Japan. That gift sparked quite a debate back at the office about what gifts we should and should not accept. SustainAbility now has Guidelines.

Most of the images on this site were taken digitally, though some—like the one of Gaia on Gigha in this section—were shot from print originals in photograph albums. Most of the recent ones have been taken with IXUS cameras. The results may not be professional, but the small size of the camera means you can take in anywhere and everywhere, which now and then has got me into a certain amount of trouble.

In any event, whatever the camera of the moment may have been, one of my great pleasures over the years has involved compiling huge, complex albums of the results, collaging the images together in ways that probably have their roots in my childhood--when I loved poring through my father's many photograph albums and lined my room in collages cut from my father’s and his mother’s National Geographic magazines. In the end, that way of storing photographs became too much, so that I was constantly 2-3 years behind. And then came the blog—and an alternative way of sharing images and the stories that go with them.

With photographs scattered throughout this website and blog, I don’t need to say much more on just how pervasive this vice has been in my life, but what I hope to do in this section is to create a of gallery for some the photos that wouldn’t otherwise make it onto the site.