Welcome

I am showing some work in a show called Elephant in a Room at Linear House Gallery in Greenwich, as part of the Crossing Lines group. The focus of the show is the Elephant & Castle, and my work (collectively called "Memory Elephant") shows my ongoing play with oil pastel applied to my photographs. You can download a flyer here. You can see my sketchwork on the Crossing Lines site.

Next I'm preparing a pack of photographic cards. It will be a pack of 8 A6 cards on the theme of "Places". Currently talking to different printers to get the right kind of card & print quality. Really boring trying to get a commercial printer to mail you back about a short-run print project...

The first release on Lost Lights is titled 'Twilight, Birds' and includes photography, guitar, and field recordings. You can see more on the Lost Lights catalogue page.

- Michael

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July 2011 : Memory Elephant - Heygate
June 2011 : Harmonica pinhole test
May 2011 : Shadows at Elephant
April 2011 : Cat in the grass, Hither Green
March 2011 : Three cats, Islington
February 2011 : Lost glove, Loughborough Juntcion
January 2011 : Ongoing project on Rainy Windows
December 2010 : Message of Love
November 2010 : Autumn in my neighbourhood
October 2010 : Cat on my street
September 2010 : Buonconvento, Italy
August 2010 : Ruskin Park Views, London

A Thousand Things is a piece made up of 1000 still images with field recordings. It is about the life of things in the city, and about trying to find inspiration in your own life.

The finished project (circa 2010) will be released as a video with printed stills.

In 2006 my grandmother finally had to move out of the house she had lived in for over 60 years. I had a month or so to take pictures before my parents came over to prepare it for sale. I continued to photograph as we sorted through collections of items and keepsakes that had been stowed away over six decades, until ultimately there was nothing but an empty house.

My hope is that I can publish a book of these photographs. I have many more in addition to the samples seen here. If you know of anyone who might be interested in this project, please get in touch. This is a very special collection of photographs.

One time I was walking along the river with my girlfriend and we found a pair of gloves on the ground. They fit, so she decided to keep them.

Ten minutes later we lost them again. Such is the nature of gloves.

Last winter I started taking pictures of gloves left behind. With so many children and tourists, they are not hard to find in London once it gets cold. When I went to the beach, all the gloves seemed to be rubber washing-up gloves. There are a lot of workman gloves around at all times of the year. You can't really photograph them all. I am looking forward to this winter when the woolly ones start to come out again . . .

In June 2006 I was on a work trip to Madrid, only for three days, so I didn't have much time to explore beyond walking around and looking at shop windows.

The intense sunlight played a great part in how I looked at these windows. I loved how some of the older shops still covered their items with coloured plastic to prevent fading. And nearly everything was impossible to view without the glare and reflection of what's behind you.

I submitted 4 of these pictures to Travel Photographer of the Year. I'm not sure why.

Some of these pictures appeared in Sonic Scope Quarterly, a pdf magazine published by Portuguese label Grain of Sound in Winter 2006.

They were accompanied by the following text:

These pictures are from a collection of photos I have taken on my way home from different places. Since I live in a large & busy place sometimes the only time I have to take pictures is at the end of the day when I'm cycling from work, travelling from friends' places, or waiting around for public transport to take me home.

This was one of my first projects purely as photography - as opposed to photos taken for cover art or web design - where I observed a theme with my pictures. They were shot with a point-and-shoot camera.

I started the TwoThousandAnd label in 2001 with fellow musician Anthony Guerra to document a developing and expanding international community of musicians.

TwoThousandAnd finished in 2007 after 18 releases. Our handmade package designs are an important and distinctive feature of the label. The label became an early outlet for my photography.

As a musician, it can be difficult sometimes not to asses every picture on its merits as an album cover . . .

These are stills from a video I made for a small tour in August 2004.

For each performance I would improvise a live soundtrack. It takes the 'Receiver' title to tie in with other sound works I produced called Receivers.

The soundtrack uses a mix of de-tuned radios creating a wash of sound that can be quiet or loud, spacious or focused. A main concern for Receivers is the notion that signals for radios, phones, and other devices are constantly flowing through us at all times. There is a sense of both stasis and change, like the traffic in River Receiver.

The 'River' refers to this concept of flow, as well as alluding to the River Thames, which runs beneath the cars in the distance.

When I have the time I intend to record a permanent soundtrack and trim it down from its original performance length of almost 30 minutes.

The TwoThousandAnd website provided an opportunity to produce works in series, working with an aesthetic theme and framing the pictures within my graphic layout.

This is the series currently seen on the site. There are galleries of two previous sets available to view at TwoThousandAnd.com.