Photography is a curious medium, somehow ill-equipped to be a truthful witness, with so many conceits, feints, sleights of hand, and darkened shadows ready to misdirect or misinform. And yet, it is a poor liar, too intimately bound to the actual, each frame constructed by the energy of reflected light from a real, physical form.
Post-production can manipulate or distort, but it can never provide the authenticity of that initial recording. We always sense when we are being deceived, even if only as a fleeting intuition. The balance of the photographer’s judgement between deception and truth is the spirit in which the photograph is made.
In my world, truth is an imagined thing, tied to heroic achievement, noble purpose, and selfless dedication. Everything we see, everything that is built, everything that has been achieved, has been made to happen by dint of will.
These things are not merely imagined into existence; they are organised, corralled, negotiated, instructed. Seemingly impossible forces, the sourcing of land, materials, skills, capital, and the greater game of market forces, are balanced in an elegant, kinetic arc of juggled ambitions and outcomes.
There is an endless restlessness to build, to start afresh, to make opportunity.
In a place constantly reinventing itself, photography becomes essential, not merely as memory or record, but as a totemic instrument evoking a spirit of newness and recent completion. It preserves the restless desire to be in flux, capturing the moment just prior to occupation, or the day the frame is raised when the potential of what is to come feels most alive – rather than the enduring solidity of the finished work.
Somehow we still seem to need the reassurance that an open sky meets an open future.
