Sometimes, I wonder why I make photographs. For a while, I used to joke that it was because I couldn’t paint. Which is true. But it is more than that. I love looking at photographs: I’m obsessed with their history and beauty. I probably have an unhealthy over-enthusiasm for the medium itself. I appropriate what overwhelms me.

I always remember photographs. They hold my attention and have a funny way of sticking in my mind. There is something magical about the way a photograph gets better as it gets older. As it gets further away from the time it was taken, as the real world out there changes, the photo accrues more aura. I make images where you can almost see the passage of time. I want the viewer to be hit with a new auratic experience. I create multiple palimpsests or layers that both augment and efface the original.

I admire Sherrie Levine’s images of original Walker Evans photographs because of the way they make the viewer aware of mechanical reproduction. That work took photography back to its origin as a document. It made an exact replica of his image… a reality of reality.

With me, however, it’s obviously not about re-photographing the photographs to make exact copies, but to intervene and bring a spectrum of feelings — warmth, humour, anxiety — to what might otherwise be considered cool aloof images. I have chosen subjects that are fundamental to the history and education of photography, like the books that are required reading or images that have had a profound influence, then I experiment with making images that are generic, iconic and alluring.

You can see the illusion of my hand in the layering. It looks like a drawing. It’s not systematic or uniform. The opacity of every layer is a different fallible, human decision. Ironically, my process is a digital one that perplexes viewers. I love the deception. It reinforces the mystery that the original objects (in the case of the books) or photos hold for me. It reminds me of one of my favourite quotes by Gilles Deleuze in his book Difference and Repetition, “…through repetition a process can sometimes be hidden.”¹

I’m drawn to repetition but also to things that take a long time to make. One of the aspects of the Becher’s work that I respect is the huge amount of time and effort it took them. How long their projects take. How engaged they are. The hours they waited for the correct light — the perfect overcast moment to get the least amount of contrast and all the detail of the architecture.

When I appropriate the Becher’s images, some of their detail gets lost and some of my own are introduced. Sometimes I amplify a resonance. For example, the subtle timelessness of their images becomes emphatically timeless in mine. I exaggerate and compress and this makes visible the intangible energy I feel when looking at their work. I make visible the legacy of their work that the viewer would otherwise only apprehend intellectually. In other words, I kind of bring all the baggage that comes with the Bechers to a single image.

But my Every… Becher pieces also go in a completely different direction to the whole ‘German school.’ My pictures are romantic and funny, uneasy and expressionistic. I take the influential teachers of a rigorously systematic, deadpan school of photography and produce an affectionate critique. I pay homage but there is a bit of the healthy disrespect of a wayward son. When we look at work that precedes us, I think we can let the work influence our practice too much. I became obsessed with looking at the Bechers work, so I had to make my own. I had to react for and against them.

Scale is a huge issue in my work (that is impossible to appreciate in an art magazine!) It’s one of the ways you can see the dynamic between what’s mine and what’s appropriated. The Every… Bechers are much bigger than the originals. It’s symbolic of the art historical importance of the Bechers.

With the book pieces too, scale is very important. We are faced with a huge book, so we are taken out of the normal experience of an intimate one to one relationship. I give the book power over the viewer. Some people find them scary or threatening. Certainly, the layers are ghostly and there is a frustration in not being quite able to read the words. The viewer takes in the whole book in a single glance. It’s kind of a fantasy and a nightmare rolled into one — the wish fulfilment of apprehending a whole book in an instant, but the fear and anxiety of never being able to understand what the book wants to tell us. It’s literally total communication and no communication at one and the same time.

In the Every… Nicholas Nixon’s Brown Sisters piece, I’m dealing with the same themes of repetition, aura and the emotional content of photography, but with a completely different genre — portraiture. When I first saw Nixon’s project, it haunted me and it reminded me of a quote by Roland Barthes: “Ultimately, what I am seeking in the photograph taken of me is death. Death is the eidos of that photograph… Life/death: the paradigm is reduced to a simple click, the one separating the initial pose from the final print. With a photograph, we enter into flat death… It flourishes a moment, then ages… Attacked by light, by humidity, it fades, weakens, vanishes.”²

In my image, all of Nicholas Nixon’s photographs of his wife and her three sisters over a twenty-year period is compressed into a single frame. Through layering each face on top of one another, I stop and accelerate the ageing process, so that the sisters’ turn to stone, caught in an eternity rather than a fleeting moment. Every… Nixon Sister distils the essence of family portraits which attempt to mitigate against death and make a permanent spectre of the individuals they depict. In all of these works, I’m exploring the sublime beauty of repetition. I wanted to see if the photographs would spin or melt or move from side to side. I wanted to seduce the viewer into spending a long time unravelling their ambiguity and their authorship. The photographs are all in some way about loss and plenitude, searching and discovery, the history of the photography and its digital future… that’s why they’re called every…

Special thanks to Sarah Thornton for the conversations that fed into this statement.

¹ Gilles Deleuze ‘Difference and Repetition’. Continuum 1994 The Athlone Press, 18
² Roland Barthes ‘Camera Lucida’. Vintage Classics 2000, 15, 92-93