The world is complicated, the mind is inventive, and we assemble usable images from incomplete information.
Photography, therefore, is not an act of recording reality for me - reality seems perfectly capable of looking after itself – it’s the immediate distance between seeing and understanding that interests me.
For most of my life I assumed everyone experienced the world as a crowded place: memories colliding with observations, fragments attaching themselves to other fragments, a flower reminding you of a conversation, a landscape carrying traces of people who left centuries ago, a face becoming entangled with a story that may or may not belong to it.
More recently, an ADHD diagnosis offered a possible explanation for some of this. It was reassuring to discover there might be a reason for the perpetual head traffic and mis-signalling. That said, after nearly seventy years of operation, receiving an user’s manual felt tardy.
My photographs began to emerge from this accumulation of the signals.
It began with places, people, flowers, architecture, rituals, landscapes and symbols, but, what followed has become less straightforward. Images are layered, combined and reassembled. Elements migrate from one frame to another. Things never physically together find themselves sharing the same visual space.
What interests me now is not accuracy but resonance.
A place is never just a place, nor a thing a thing. An image arrives carrying history, mythology, emotion, cultural baggage and whatever personal debris a viewer may bring with them. By the time experience reaches consciousness, it has already passed through several layers of interpretation.
Many of the resulting images appear complex, occasionally chaotic. This is not entirely intentional. It is simply an honest reflection of how experience often arrives.
My world presents itself as fragments. My mind attempts to assemble them and, although it sometimes succeeds, it produces an entirely different picture at times. Either way, something interesting usually comes of it.
Over time I have become less interested in documenting what is in front of me and more so in exploring what happens after I look at it. The image, therefore, becomes less a record of a place and more of an encounter between an external reality and my internal weather at the time.
Perhaps that is why flowers, gods, markets, mountains, strangers, memories and half-forgotten stories find themselves occupying the same frame. They already occupy that space in my mind.
These images are an invitation to linger and view and be captured by initial complexity. Stay a little longer and to see what emerges once certainty becomes less of a priority..
malcolm.mclauchlan@gmail.com
Younger days, in full flight