Statement

I search for ways to make forms of contemporary power visible, and legible.

Over the course of a decade I have produced a series of long term projects, each focusing on a specific form of power. These have ranged from examining the hard power of opaque security organizations and advanced technological systems to the more abstract power to reshape collective memory or manipulate international laws.

While each project is designed to be a discrete, self-enclosed work, they are critically all connected elements of a much larger inquiry into the nature of power in the time in which we live. This reflects the reality that these individual forms of power never exist in isolation but are bound closely together. One form of power is often only possible because it is facilitated and supported by another. Therefore, to speak of any one form of power requires attention to the larger networks of which it is a part.

I do not think of myself as artist, or a photographer. I draw ideas from both fields and also from my training and experiences as a historian, humanitarian researcher, and social scientist, to create works which blend aspects of visual arts, qualitative research, and advocacy. The projects I produce span different media, combining elements of photography, film, installation, and other techniques.

I focus on power because I believe it is the thing most definitive of life today, as it is concentrated into ever fewer hands, it’s mechanisms become more compelling, and it is mobilised to change the lives of ever greater numbers of people than at any other point in human history. Power and its consequences are everywhere, in the cities we inhabit, the devices that we use, the ideas that we consume, and even in the food we eat and the air we breathe.

Yet power itself is invisible, it has no tangible form of its own, and always inhabits something else. It is, in this sense, something which is very pure but also very elusive. This quality poses profound challenges to many traditions of representation, including that of the socially concerned documentary photography, which often claims to address unequal power relations, but often ends up becoming complicit in them.

I envisage my work will ultimately span twelve major projects, six of which are completed, two in progress, and four planned. Individually and together these works will seek, in however small a way, to address our failure to represent power.