Introduction
Today is the first of a series of five posts from a long-form feature written for Medium Format Magazine earlier in the year (some of you may be familiar with my philosophical musings from my column in the magazine In Pursuit of Transparency). This series will be a bit different to anything I’ve done before on the site; usually we tend to focus on either a sequence of images with minimal commentary – in the form of a photoessay – or detailed discourse around a single topic. This series of images are from personally significant points in my medium format shooting career. They have had to pass curation not solely for being visually interesting and having a self-contained narrative, but also having a back story that is often more interesting than the photograph itself – and without the creator to tell the story, there’s no way you’d get to hear it.
Sometimes it’s around an idea or a particular inspiration; sometimes it’s around the execution; sometimes it’s about serendipity. There’s planning and there’s luck; there’s preparedness and there’s the mad scramble. There’s the behind the scenes peek into the chaotic life that’s necessary of a modern photographer – much less of it is about making pictures than building relationships. More often than not there are stories about the people involved – subject, client, production. It has not been easy to select these as there is always a strong emotional attachment to your favourite images – and there tend to be a lot of them if you’re prolific. It’s almost as bad as asking a parent to select their favourite child.
Let me know what you think. If the response from these posts is positive, I’d like to do more of this in the future…MT
