Welcome

The first release on Lost Lights is out now!.
It is titled 'Twilight, Birds' and includes photography, guitar, and field recordings. Gotten good reviews so far. You can see more on the Lost Lights catalogue page.

April's picture is from some work I've been doing around the idea of Urban Imagintation. You can see some more about this on the CUCR-LIP Crossing Lines page.

Next I'm preparing a pack of postcards for sale. Should be a pack of 6-10 different cards. And finishing A Thousand Things . . .

- Michael

left right

April 2010 : Urban Imagination first attempt
March 2010 : Battersea, London
February 2010 : Ongoing project on Rainy Windows
January 2010 : winter view from my house
December 2009 : Decorated tree, London
November 2009 : Islington, London
October 2009 : Nikko, Japan
September 2009: Kyoto, Japan
August 2009 : Cat on my street
July 2009 : Snails in my local park
June 2009 : Bird on my street
May 2009 : Cat in my neighbour's window

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.

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

Last year 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.