I came to live on a beach near Marmaris after a busy full-time career spent helping others. By profession I was a social worker and a psychotherapist. After more than thirty years in the field it was pretty obvious that there is something fundamentally wrong with the way our world is going, and it seemed equally obvious that there was very little I could do to remedy it.
Nevertheless I decided to make a start.
It was clear that helping individuals, or even groups within my profession would not make that much difference. Besides I was getting ’stale’ and needed new challenges.
Two things seemed to me to be imperative. Firstly, to give my baby daughter the very best start I could in life. After all she will, hopefully, be around long after I’m gone and with the right ideals and mind-set may achieve more than I can. Secondly, since politicians and scientists seem to be failing us, whatever I offer must come from the inside outwards, from the heart if you like, rather than being engineered, or even planned.
An exhibition, of course, does need planning and coordination, but I’m not writing about that kind of detail when thinking about this body of photographic work.
At first I simply put my house in order, literally for the dwelling in which I live with my family had to be rebuilt. Then, seemingly, I did nothing. But during this unplanned doing nothingness I came to take photographs of my friends, the terrain, our garden, and whatever else took my fancy.
I’ve always been a photographer. I used the family Box Ensign long before I was given my first camera at the age of eight. I struggled to make prints at home and within the school camera club. Eventually I signed up for a photography course given by Michael Eldridge, with whom I share this exhibition.
Later my work expanded. In a parallel career in publishing I learned how to take pictures to illustrate stories, and for commercial purposes.
These photographs though are different. They are simply reflections that I found when walking in my back yard. Nothing is contrived about them. Where I’ve used techniques to tone, or emphasise areas of an image it has simply been in the photographic tradition of rendering on paper the image I saw in my mind.
In Tibet, I am told, when someone is sick a traditional doctor, frequently a shamanic priest, may be called and s/he will prescribe a course of meditation that involves gazing into a Mandala.
I believe pictures have a similar ability to heal, not in a prescriptive kind of way as the result of a Feng Shui consultation, although I’m sure my photographs could be used to great advantage in this manner. Rather, when they are properly framed, and respected, they have the ability to focus your mind back into the land of your ancestors. A land largely unpolluted and unspoilt.
It is only through such a focus that our world can be healed and made whole once again.