About Andy

With my switch from film to digital, I grew from being a photographer into a light-sculptor.  I make photographs, rather than take them. The image creation process only just begins when I click the shutter, in much the same way as sketches and under-paintings are just the beginning of a painting.  Whether an concept has been lying dormant in my imagination for years, waiting for the conditions to be right to take the photo that will be the “under-painting” of my image, or whether it has happened in a flash, the image has already been pre-visualised and I know where I want to go with it. (True, some don’t work out quite as I’d like, but then others surprise me with where they take me, so it all works out!)

My best work is created when I am inspired – sometimes a great image will be created in the spur of a moment, others only come after long and hard work, both in the field and in my ‘lightroom”. What inspires me? That’s hard to define, as the subjects can be varied, but I’m always looking to create something new, something that hasn’t been done in quite the same way before. I love beauty, mostly in nature, and in quirky and interesting places. There is often so much focus in the art world on making a statement, whether it’s social, political or anything else. I guess my statement is simply that there is a lot of beauty around us, and taking a tiny moment out of our day to notice it can temporarily shift our minds away from our issues, and, hopefully, inspire us.

I didn’t set out to be a photographer, but things always seem to work out; after leaving high school I found myself in a small graphic design studio. From there I went on to freelance at many London and Sydney design studios, in between bouts of hitchhiking around various parts of the world, attending the University of Life as my grandfather put it! Although I had various “muk-en-druk” cameras as a kid, during my travels I acquired an SLR camera, and then another (one for slides and one for black and white or infrared film), and promptly started annoying my boyfriend who complained about my incessant snapping. So I dumped the boyfriend, kept  the camera, rescued my passion for photography, and, 15 years on the result is what you see on these pages. (Oh, and another boyfriend who is as passionate about my photography as he is about me!)