One day on my wanderings I found a ladder propped against a tree in the woods. The scene reminded me of a photograph I had once seen by William Henry Fox Talbot. ‘The Haystack’ is thought to have been taken in 1845. 

 

Talbot was the inventor of the negative positive process and is credited as the father of Photography. He made photographs of his home at Lacock Abbey in England, its pastoral surroundings, and many still life arrangements. His first book of photographs was called “The Pencil of Nature”. 

 

This was the starting point for a series of landscape photographs that I would begin to make. For about eighteen months I explored my immediate habitat, looking for interactions between man made construction and nature. I would travel with Talbot’s book title at the forefront of my mind. 

 

As I progressed, I began to think more about photography's relationship with nature, and the ways in which photographers tend to conform when encountering the landscape. I hoped that I would be able to move away from my former, more conventional approaches to the subject­. 

 

Everything else, including the format, the decision to make photographs in black and white, and the Weegee-like use of flash, followed in due course.