Statement

In my work I look for ways to make forms of contemporary power visible, and more importantly legible.

I focus on power because I believe it is the most definitive and important aspect of contemporary life, as it is concentrated into fewer hands than at any other point in history, it’s mechanisms and structures become more compelling, and it is mobilised to change the lives of ever greater numbers of people. Power and its consequences are everywhere around us, but it is itself invisible, it has no tangible form of its own, and always inhabits something else.

This quality poses profound challenges to traditions of representation, including those of documentary photography in which I often find my work positioned. 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, perhaps because our culture of celebrity causes us to misidentify visibility as something of inherent value. The powerful meanwhile, who were often ultimately responsible for these social wrongs, are able to enjoy a profound invisibility, or to make themselves visible only on their own terms.

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.

Together I see my projects as forming a counter-archive to the traditional archive, a site which reoccurs throughout my projects as a product and tool of power. This desire to produce a form of connected counter-archive also reflects my view that the individual forms of power with which I am concerned never exist in isolation but rather are bound closely together. One form of power is often made possible because it is facilitated and supported, reconfigured or augmented, by the functioning of another type of power. Therefore, to speak usefully of any one of them also requires attention to the larger networks of which it is a part.

I am ambivalent about being called a photographer and reject the label of artist, although I draw on techniques and ideas from both these fields, as well as from my training and experiences as a historian, humanitarian researcher, journalist, and social scientist. I look to create works which blend aspects of visual arts, qualitative research, and sometimes small elements of advocacy. 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.