Urban Abstraction - Hobart
It was my father who first introduced me to the mysterious alchemy of photography. He taught me how to develop film and opened the door to the darkroom, where images slowly emerged from darkness, seemingly by magic. Those early experiences stayed with me.
Many years later, I had the honour of studying at Alexander Mackie College of Advanced Education, where I majored in art and photography. I remember one particular moment when my photography teacher, the great George Schwarz asked me what sort of photographs I wanted to create.
My answer was simple.
“I don’t want to do pretty pictures.”
He immediately understood. Rather than trying to steer me towards convention, he embraced the answer, and George became an important mentor to me.
Finding Abstraction in the Everyday
I have always looked through a camera differently.
Where others might see a wall, I see a composition. Where there is peeling paint, I see colour and texture.
Rust becomes a palette. Cracks become lines. Shadows become shapes. Weathered surfaces, discarded fragments, industrial structures and the gradual erosion of things all begin to reveal something unexpected.
I guess I am drawn to what is overlooked.
The things most people walk past without noticing are often the very things that catch my eye.
A faded surface can hold extraordinary colour. Rust and decay can possess its own strange beauty and become almost painterly.
A fragment of architecture can lose its identity and become something entirely abstract.
I seek out these moments, not to document the urban landscape, but to discover what is already there within it.
Seeing What Others Walk Past
This is what I have always called my photography: urban abstraction.
For me, the camera is not simply a means of recording what I see. It is a way of isolating, rearranging and revealing.
I look for the accidental compositions that exist all around us, shapes, colours, textures, lines and layers that appear when we slow down enough to notice them.
Sometimes the subject is recognisable. Sometimes it disappears completely.
What remains is an image that can be experienced almost like a painting.
My photography is about looking again.
About finding beauty where it was never intended to be.
About noticing the extraordinary within the ordinary.
“I have always looked upon decay as being just as wonderful and rich an expression of life as growth.”
- Henry Miller
