I’m a 37 year old, based in Cornwall, UK. Growing up I was always the one that would run away or hide my face whenever a camera came out.
While I’ve always been creative either in a musical or writing sense, in my early twenties a mix of becoming seriously mentaly unwell as well as a couple of supportive creative friends led to me picking up a camera and I haven’t looked back since.
For over ten years now photography has become a way of coping with my poor mental health as well as an exploration of making sense of the confusing and changing world around me. It’s one of the few times that I feel my thoughts melt away and it has become a crutch that I lean on often in order to feel mentally well.
People do remote shoots in various ways but my way of approaching shoots is very DIY. Everything is created in camera, so I photograph the screen. There is no photo editing trickery, all of the effects are created by placing various objects in front of the camera to distort the subject.
I definitely enjoy photographing people the most. I know that it’s challenging socially for me which makes it feel more worthwhile when the images come out looking like I want them to. Photographing flowers is a strong second place there, there’s a peacefulness to photographing flowers that I don’t get from capturing people.
I prefer to do shoots through Zoom for a couple of reasons. The main reason is my mental health. I find social meetings incredibly stressful because I find people in general quite stressful to be around so this is a better way to do this without creating excessive anxiety on me. Part of my anxiety around people is probably why I enjoy making people look the way they do in my images because it’s a reflection of how I often view people anyway.
The secondary reason is that I live in quite an idyllic part of the UK. Within this, the photography scene is very beauty based. It’s highly focused around girls in bikini’s on a beach. So in some respects, my work is a reaction and a conflict to that. But it also means that the chances of finding people to sit for portraits locally is lessened.
