A Very Warm Welcome...
...to my website. The work here is my personal project which itself is about the Wye Valley, the Forest-of-Dean and my infrequent trips through Wales. It's about the life and objects all around us.
My studio is located in the beautiful lower Wye Valley near Chepstow.
Philosophy.
Photography has many aspects, and this is my visualisation. No arty-farty psycho babble. No lying digital manipulations, No digital fakery, just my camera, my film, my chemistry, my alchemy, my honesty.
This is where I live and work, this is my life, my travel, my breath, my sight, my love, my hate, my despair, my glory.
My work is monochrome. I love it. Its inexplicable, ineffable, tangible, something that is so expressive, pure and raw.
The Negative is the absolute essence of purity of image, the absolute truth. It is so physical and tangible. Real. I prefer keeping the use of Photoshop to an absolute minimum even when shooting digital. Photography should be about what is there, in the scene. The here, the now, constrained only by physical and chemical processes and not virtual unreality.
Behind most of the pictures there is a story and collectively they form an essay. The ruin, the ruined, the antique the antiquated, the dilapidated, the rusting, the abandoned, the discarded, the rejected. Rotting. My story is one of what we leave behind, only punctuated by momentary shifts of focus.
Picture of the month.
ABOVE: What I like shooting, the Severn Breeze. Scanned from a print made on Ilford warm tone fibre and developed in dilute AGFA Neutol WA. The negative is Kodak Tri-X exposed at EI200 and developed in Pyrogallol, a nineteenth century developer. The boat, the Severn Breeze has since been destroyed. The location is the Old Wye Bridge, Chepstow.
THANK YOU for visiting, it's a privilege to be able to share my work with you. I hope you do like it. Please feel free to comment. Email me: chris (at) angryskies.co.uk (spelled to prevent those perfidious spammers who should be collectively shot).
