The Personal Made Public:

Just sitting down to a beer and thinking about my expiences with photography. I have been away from the camera for some time now, shooting bits and pieces but not where I want to be in terms of the work I want to be making. I,m in Canada and no excuses will do anymore. What is photography to me, everyone has their own view on the subject but the more I think about it, I think we all see photography in the main stream as the external image we spent to the world of our innermost and everyday experiences of the world around us. When I think about the important images in my life they always tend towards those of the characters i have encountered through my life. The only image I ever really took of my father shortly before he died, the instance of that image to me, as my only personal record of the man. The four years I struggled with mourning for him, the work I tried to make in honor of his life and it's influence opn the man I perceive myself to be today. That image of my father is sad in more ways than once, he doesn't present the image of health or happiness, yet all through my life I regarded my father in terms of his strength and his easy going attitude to life, his laugh, his quietness. He was a man of few words, yet when he would come home from a nights drinking with my mum, he would always wake us up to tell us stories of when he lived in Roscommon with his family, shooting ducks on the way home from the pub, his first drink with his dad; a pint bottle of macardles. Second in the images of my past are the images of the women I have spent my life with, they never age, they stay exactly as I first picture them, they are timeless, the memories may tell a different story, yet the photographs only reveal their beauty and their presence. The photograph is "the girl in the winter garden" , Roland's Barthes mother, is truly what I am trying to describe. The photograph mains outside of time, yet still bears witness to the " this has been" it cannot be disputed. Yes he did exist, yes she was beautiful in her own way. The photographs beauty is that of stillness, the moment remains and the voices have faded. It is the quintessence of the external memory, it is available to us at a moments call, it evokes the moment, it stirs the emotions within us. It is nothing more than the very personal inner experiences contained. Yet the means of unpacking it remaisn within the grasp of the individual. The photograph will always strive to be more than a mere object of memory, yet that is where it's powers lie. In opening the private moment to the public view, yet what is contained within may well remain outside of the publics understanding/empathy.