I started talking photographs in a self-consciously ‘serious’ way when I was about 13 or 14 years old. Around this time my dad gave me a very capable compact 35mm rangefinder camera with an astonishingly sharp and bright (f1.4) lens, which he in turn had been given by his grandfather. I remember feeling a kind of responsibility to do more than just take snaps with it.
Photography has never been a primary focus, and I’ve never seen myself as ‘a photographer’. But I’ve taken photographs more or less continuously since that early age.
I have rarely shot series or done photographic project work. Location might sometimes impose some visual consistency. But looking through my libraries I’m struck by how so many of my photographs exist in isolation, as a singular idea. This has made editing them here challenging. Thematic connections and visual commonalities are elusive. So the headings I’ve grouped them under are intentionally elastic – Place, House, Face, Street, Circumstance. I’ve added a page titled Interventions as somewhere to group photographs made with very different intentions (the Not Photography refereed to).
Jim Manson 