Statement

Breaker Boys, Lewis Hine, 1910

Through my work I seek to make forms of contemporary power visible, and legible. I focus on power because I believe it is the most definitive aspect of contemporary life, as it is concentrated into fewer hands than at any other point in time, it’s mechanisms and structures 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 around us, but power itself is invisible, it has no tangible form of its own, and always inhabits something else. This quality poses profound challenges to many traditions of representation, including that of the socially concerned documentary photography in which I often find my work situated. This tradition, while well intentioned and often productive, has tended to focus on those without power, and often subject to the ill effects of it, while those with power, who were often ultimately responsible for these social wrongs, have repeatedly escaped visibility. I seek in a small way to address that in my practice.

Over the course of a decade I have produced a series of long term projects, each focusing on a specific form or aspect 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 legal systems. While each of my projects is designed to be a discrete, self-enclosed work, I also seem them as connected elements of a much larger inquiry into the nature of power, which together form a sort of counter-archive to the traditional archive, which reoccurs throughout my projects as a tool of power. This desire to produce a form of counter-archive also reflects my view that these individual forms of power never exist in isolation but are bound closely together. One form of power is often made possible because it is facilitated and supported, or finds itself in other ways reconfigured or augmented, by the functioning of another type of power. Therefore, to speak usefully of any one power also requires attention to the larger networks of which it is a part.

While I often employ the labels of photographer and occasionally artist, I do not think of myself as either. I draw ideas and techniques 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 sometimes advocacy. The projects I produce span different media, combining elements of photography, film, installation, and other techniques. My aim is that my practice will ultimately span twelve major projects, the subjects of which I have already defined, as well as numerous smaller works and publications. Individually and together these projects seek, in however small a way, to address our failure to represent power.