"Our minds are filled with noise, and that’s why we can’t hear the call of life" - Thich Nhat Hanh

This won’t describe my work, or tell you what my photographs are about. That’s their own job. I’d like, however, to share some thoughts about how, over the course of more than two decades of image-making, I have been increasingly interested in the politics of the image, the ethics of image-making, and the agency of image-makers. My photography has changed along with my views on those topics, bringing me to a creative paradox I struggle to resolve, yet embrace with enthusiasm. I’d rather share the ethical challenges that paradox presents than to present my work.

Imagine, for a moment, the experience of sitting on grandma’s sofa looking at her yellowing family album. How different is that experience from viewing the same images on an online album on your phone, even if sitting on the same sofa? Is the pace of the conversation slower, the time spent on each photo distinct? Do the prints connect you with the moment the image was made? Later, would the memory of those alternative experiences generate different feelings? Those experiences are surely different, but instead of trying to decide if that is a matter of degree or if they are qualitatively different, let’s agree that still images hold — by their very nature — the ability to attend to the world in a slower, reflective, sometimes analytical mode. Perhaps this isn’t quite right. Is it maybe more accurate to say that still images — by their very nature — enable our attending to the world in those particular modes? One step further: our practices of making images enable us to pay attention to the world in a slower, reflective, sometimes analytical mode.

In approaching a more precise understanding of that enabling of modes of attention, I am trying to establish solid enough ground to think through the experience of the image in different modes, and their implications — because photographs can also (and indeed do) add to the overwhelming torrent of information we are subjected to subject ourselves and each other to, inciting fleeting and superficial engagement, the very opposite of slow and reflective. This paradox might not be inherent to still images, but maybe a function of our modes of making, sharing, using and consuming them through our normalised practices of seeing, which are increasingly utilitarian, transactional, numbing.

The above isn’t intended as idle theoretical musing. The point is to think how might image-making contribute to closer encounters with the world, instead of adding to the incessant noise that surrounds and numbs us? Can we escape the paradox? How can image making resist the torrent of data in which noise and signal are becoming increasingly indistinguishable, if not interchangeable? What assumptions (and presumptions) do image makers hold that their images are anything more than another drop in the rushing flood of mindless visual content? The noise of the world influences our values and how we apply them; it confounds our minds with its fast-paced diorama of alluring yet hollow ambitions; it feeds the illusions that widen our antagonisms; it makes us pliable to the lies and fictions that dominate electoral systems; it disables metacognitive access to our fossilised mental schemata; it renders us passive in our inability to think through the noise.

My image-making grapples with this paradox: how do I use visual language without adding to the noise? (I’ll assume we’re in agreement on what for). Is that even possible? If not, what’s the point of contributing to the noise? How could the images on this website rise above the noise level, a level also heightened by our self-promotion urges? If slowing our visual attention invites a different awareness of the world and of ourselves, how can creating yet more images contribute to a culture of less? I centre my image-making on the moment of the visual encounter, to communicate less what is seen in the image and more the quality of the encounter, the still moment in which the perceiving is the event, and the object of interest recorded in the image. I try to divest my practice of intentions, expectations, or attainment (Ch. 無念, munen), be they professional, artistic or commercial, to practice a visual language that points at the qualia of our encounters with the world, that shares the self-sufficiency of the experience of the present as an act of resistance — resistance against our voracious need for more of everything now, a need that carries us and that we ourselves perpetuate. I seek, in the stillness of the photograph, that which points us to what is available outside the dictatorship of chronology and the compulsions of capitalism, to instead consider time as opportunity, as ‘propitious moment’ (Gr. καιρός, kairós). As Jack Kornfield writes, “the quieting of the mind is a political act” (in ‘The Wise Heart’). Even as far back as 1960, Thomas Merton was admonishing us that

The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence. More than that, it is cooperation in violence. The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful (in ‘Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander’).

And yet, here we are today. Well over half a century after Merton’s ‘modern life’, the rush and pressure are exponential, the demands innumerable. Violence, he called it. Guilty bystanders.

I suspect that if my images may convey the encounter, they most surely do not escape the paradox. Photographers are best disabused of such presumptions. Yet we must act as if otherwise. The inescapability of the paradox is (I think) the source of the absurdist themes in my images. In the Camusian absurdist triad, emancipation is not available through negation of the absurd. Only through its affirmation are we able to revolt against it, and thereby attain freedom. Sometimes, when I feel less convinced that this amounts to an ethically coherent or credible position, I stop making images altogether. There is, after all, another revolution taking place all the time, available to all, at every moment, for free. One that doesn’t underdeliver on promises and overdeliver in bloodshed, like most or all revolutions do. To sit down in silence, smiling, is a revolutionary act, as Thich Nhat Hanh taught.

These concerns about an ethics of engagement and of action in the world interest me also in non-visual modes of enquiry, through epistemological and pedagogical research. The critical analysis of what education and universities are and do today continues to require not only the recognition of the systems of domination that constrain and format our practices, behaviours and experiences, but also the “necessary revolution” of “rethinking ways of knowing, a deconstruction of old epistemologies, and […] a transformation in our classrooms” (bell hooks, in ‘Teaching to Transgress’). We need to acknowledge and state that our paradigm of hyperproductivity (alive in education as it is elsewhere) is harmful, including through its rapacious depletion of our mental resources and its deafening signal-to-noise ratio (vide the explosion of vacuous papers engendered by ‘publish or perish’ culture), and act to change our educational practices to operate, educate and create in ways that replenish and stimulate resources.

Whom might we encounter in ourselves and in each other, if freed from the allure of ‘more’ that imprisons us, if emancipated from the spurious cycle (San. संसार, saṃsāra) of ‘more of everything now’? What might the images and the words that can take us there look and sound like?

London, summer of 2026