I am a British, Berlin based photographer. I was born in 1976 and raised in London, UK. I have been photographing for about 20 years, professionally for almost 10. I have a background in tattoo and illustration, elements of which have influenced my photography. I have lived in Berlin for the last 2 years, and prior to that have lived, worked, and travelled in numerous locales including the USA, various countries in Europe, and South East Asia.

My artistic approach has been described as emotive, theatrical, and psychological. I feel my photographs, especially my portraiture, have been influenced by my interest in folklore, the metaphysical, and the cinematic. Symbology and folkloric morphology are ideas that I consciously incorporate into my work. Magical realism is a very apt descriptive of my work, aesthetically and psychologically. I’m interested in the mysterious, the fantastical, and the supernatural. Superficially this is evident from the brooding, sometimes ominous tones of my portraits. On a deeper level, I am looking for a way to access a common mythology, similar to the Jungian idea of the collective unconscious, as a means to explore what frightens and allures us by degrees, and the unanswered questions of the human experience. My portraits have a distinct visual style, and a distinctive tone, one which is darkly theatrical, and emotionally evocative. I want my photographs to appeal to our desire for the darkly beautiful and the mysterious. The eyes are of particular interest and focus to me, which I try to use as a conduit into the photograph and the world that lives beyond and just out of reach of our own. This alternate reality is one composed of shadows, where emotion is tangible and magic exists. It’s this appeal to transcend the mundane which fuels the worlds of fantasy and the occult. My earliest and most profound influences, were the works of Carravagio and Burne-Jones Sr. The use of light, shadow, and depth to suspend reality, in order to evoke a certain mood.

The first portraits that truly captured my imagination were the ones I would see in comic books and graphic novels. Deeply shadowed and inked close ups drawn to express certain emotions, usually highly charged with drama and mood. It’s this sense of the dramatic and theatrical that is evident in my work and in how I process the photos to achieve this effect. The choice of subject is dependent not solely on the subjects look, although I am aware of my need for a certain aesthetic when choosing my subjects, but more importantly on how the subjects convey emotion through gesture and expression. I lay a lot of emphasis on the subjects eyes, through which I attempt to draw out as much detail, structure, and texture as I can. I achieve this by careful and precise adjustment of definition, contrast, sharpness, and structure. I tend to approach the process of editing holistically, as I generally have a clear idea of the mood the finished picture should convey but the means of getting to the end result is not set until I approach the task of editing the pictures. I do not use photoshop, preferring instead to a use a simple set of adjustments, which I apply in layers and in precise and controlled amounts to achieve the desired effects. All the adjustments I use are applied individually and brushed in, rather than blocked in, as a set of imprecise global settings. In some cases I will “paint” individual pixels to achieve a particular detail appropriate to the piece. Texture is important to my work especially the contrast between skin tones and the often heavily dark backgrounds, and how the two blend and shift into one another. I take a lot of time over each picture, even when the shooting settings and conditions are identical. I want each piece to have it’s own voice, so I will take the time to reapply and rebrush the individual settings instead of just copying the previous adjustments.