VUE

What came first, adventure or pho- tography? ey both sort of came at the same time. I grew up in the country and even as a kid, I did quite a bit of paint- ing before I went to e University of Edinburgh. ings snowballed between the links of adventure and image-making. I took a drawing and painting course, but I always end- ed up spending a lot of time in the dark rooms. At the same time, I was training and working as a climbing and outdoor instructor, taking peo- ple out into the highlands. I proba- bly spent more time than I should have climbing, which meant I didn't spend enough time in the studio at art school. I sort of got in trouble for one, and then got in trouble for the other— but it all came out in the wash. In my 20s, most of my image-mak- ing was purely fine art. Now, I can sort of distinguish between commercial photography and the fine art side of my work which involves a lot of draw- ings. At that point, my photography was based on a fine art aesthetic. I wasn't trying to sell it. It wasn't about sport or adventure. It was about questioning nature and the environment. at sort of shied in 2009, when I went down to the Antarctic to work as a field guide. It was a critical point for me because I had never used a digital cam- era—it was back in the heyday when the Canon 5d Mark 2 was rocking the independent video world. I took that time to do some filming and take photos. I stayed there for 18 months non-stop. I had a 4x5 large format plate camera, what I had been photographing with during most of my time in art school. Sad to say, I didn't take many celluloid images down in the Ant- arctic. I was a bit late to the party. I was so obsessed with the possibilities you had in the dark room with selenium toning and the actual chemical process. So it wasn't until that point that I was really convinced that digital could do what I wanted it to do. In the Antarctic, I took 20,000 photos over 18 months. Now I can take that many in one month. At that point, having just jumped from celluloid, it opened up a lot of possibilities and most of the imagery I took down there was a totally different genre. It wasn't fine art based. It was more adventure. I was guiding scientists down there, working at a national research station. It was like the days, weeks and months were punc- tuated by adventures into really crazy, crazy plac- es. e minute approach of celluloid large format just went out the window. I'd say that's where things came together—my fine art practice took on a different role from then on. V U E N J . C O M 84

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