Reflective thoughts on my wonderlust.

Locations of where my family and I have travelled to.One of the initial reasons I got into photography was due to my enjoyment of travel and seeing other places.  My parents are well travelled and I grew up travelling to a number of places.  This includes living in India for a couple of years and spending extensive time in France, Southern Africa and central Switzerland.  This desire to have these experiences, very quickly led to my desire to document them.  This obsesive desire to bring back visual record and "evidence" has dominated a lot of my practice as an artist.

This realisation of my conpulsive nature when it comes to photographing everything that goes on has led me to think about this nature in certain people.  This eventually led me to start investigating the relationship between photography and the advance of the European empires.  Colonisation and photography do have an interesting relationship, I am will continue to investigate this further.

Exhibition Burke + Norfolk: Photographs From The War In Afghanistan

I went to visit the recent exhibition by photographer Simon Norfolk.  The work is presented as a collaboration between the artist and a 19th century artist John Burke.  This "collaboration" presents both Burkes orignal works alongside Norfolk's contemporary work.

Quote from Tate website:

"Norfolk’s photographs reimagine or respond to Burke’s Afghan war scenes in the context of the contemporary conflict."

I found this interesting juxtaposition of new and old engaging.  Especially as I have been looking at some of the early context of photography and its relationship to overseas travel.  Also it plays into my research based around the ideas of photography and its role in war and social change.

Research: Colonialism and Photography

I have been collecting images in other countries including; Zimbarbwe, Turkey, USA, Morocco and Iraq.  This desire to document the places I have been and bring back images (almost as trophies) has made me start to connect what I am doing with the very history of photography.

As the invention of photography (both Daguerre and Talbot) starting spreading around world, photographers starting using 'field' cameras to take out door photos and record the exotic and far off places.  This ability to give people back home a photorealistic glimpse into these far off lands became appealing.

I have been doing some research into the relationship between early photography and Europe's colonisation of the world.

Some of these early photographers recorded these places in more formal portrait sittings of the local inhabitants. Others choose to document the places in a more 'travel' style.