Took a Mamiya 7 for a spin up to Washington Heights. Both images were shot without a tripod, so I’ve had to correct the perspective in PSD. Still…

Here’s a question: If you take 30  photos, yank their perspective lines, crop them unmercififully, blend them together, add texture layers, merge them with blocks of colour, and then digitally spray the resulting image onto treated paper using ink, is it still photography?

I’m only half joking.

We’ve certainly come a long way since that narrow-minded attitude that photography = painting with light.  Now we have reportage, fashion, wedding, street, documentary, macro, landscape, wildlife, portraiture, fine art..

I switched from digital to film because I couldn’t afford a €20,000 digital camera that could give me what film can. Hence, I’m a traditionalist.

The digital retouchers, employed to maintain a barbie-doll aestethic in magazine spreads, could piss all over me with their photo-blending skills. Yet I’m the artist?

I hate artists’ statements.

Thanks to the internet, we’ve entered an age of artificial openness.  Adam Curtis refers to this as “the reinvention of a Victorian notion of public selves” . Hence the temptation to become bland, dishonest salespeople.

I longed to be taken seriously. Now I have a site called “I don’t know” in isiXhosa, featuring a dog sniffing another dog’s bumhole.

I don’t trust a single word I ever write. I’m happier making images.

Yes! Another dreary, dilapidated urban setting. Stitched these from a series of images – It’s not anything yet, merely a stage for something. Dogs, probably.

An initial stitch from 35mm scans (Neopan 100). Needs work. Thought I was shooting a roll of 160 colour (for the soupy yellow puddles) and so I overexposed the damn roll and now have some a sort of pencil drawing of dark lines and smudges. Might suit one of those treated handmade papers. Hmm hmmm…

Some test shots on my 35mm using Kodak Portra 160NC. Liking the natural, muted colours. Seems like an ideal film for digital manipulation.

My brother sent me some photos of Queens that he took some years back. I couldn’t use them in my main work so I decided to have a laugh with them instead. The above statue is taken (with apologies) from Rowan Gillespie’s Famine Memorial in Dublin.

Some images are so heavily referential that all you can do is stick them in a gallery. Here, a particularly Irish one.

A Queens neighbourhood, stiched. Click for larger image..