Silver & Light

I am a photographer and an independent philosopher. The two rarely go together, but happen to in me.

I love film photography and darkroom printing. The two inextricably go together – I see my photographs as simply the first stage of a long process that culminates in a print. If a photograph does not end up as a print, I feel the lack of something important, an unfinished business.

The big advantage of working in the darkroom is that you learn a lot about the limits of the photographs that you take. The darkroom exposes your mistakes. It provides the best feedback you can get.

On this website I do three things: Firstly, I share the many frustrations I encounter in learning the business of film development and print making. Secondly, I write about what photography means to me by looking at the work of other photographers and sometimes my own. Thirdly I write about philosophy, mainly in a discursive way. For me philosophy is nothing other than learning to employ concepts in the making sense of things. It does not aim to strive for the ‘hidden truth’ of things, but only to re-conceive what is already there in a different light. And that, of course, is what we photographers do too, re-conceive in a different light.