When did you first decide you wanted to be a photographer?
When I was 15 or 16, a photographer came to visit us who was working for National Geographic. I became her assistant for a few days and loved her beautiful F2 Nikon cameras. When I saw Ansel Adams’ photographs, I realised what these exquisite machines could do with exquisite nature. I knew then what I wanted to do. I spent a year at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in upstate New York, which is an incredible photography school.
But you ended up becoming a documentary film maker…
In the early 1980s, TV was taking over and someone offered me a job filming the Soviet Occupation in Afghanistan. I was 23 years old; they gave me a Super8 camera, a big bag of film and quite a lot of cash, and off I went to Pakistan and snuck over the border. Soon after that, I was commissioned by BBC’s Panorama to make a film about Afghanistan, and spent the next five years going back there. It was a baptism of fire. I also made documentaries in Iraq during both Gulf Wars.
In 1994, I got the chance to make a documentary about the wreck of the Titanic. It was an incredible experience – I filmed the grand staircase in a submersible. The Titanic took over my life for a bit. But, in the end, the film projects were getting bigger and bigger, and I was getting further and further away from holding a camera. In 2013, I went back to stills photography.
What shaped the kind of images you want to make?
I had worked with brilliant underwater photographer, Christoph Gerigk, who uses a mosaic technique, putting together hundreds of photographs to make a single image. I wanted to go beyond what the camera can do with a single image to make very detailed, high-resolution, immersive images, and digital photography was making that possible. I take hundreds of images at a time. It’s very technical and time-consuming and you have to be patient when it doesn’t go as well as you would like. Sometimes it’s only when I see a picture at scale, coming out of my huge Epsom 64-inch-wide printer, that I realise why that particular image works so well.
Why are you drawn to wild, empty places?
The untravelled world is getting very small. I like the sense of capturing the sublime and sharing it with people. It’s the pursuit of wonder.
Do you do a lot of work on the images digitally?
Apart from the process of putting multiple images together, no. I’m very interested in the world as it is. When you’ve seen the Titanic in front of your eyes, you realise life is unbelievably fascinating without embellishment. Now, with AI, any photograph can be created, I have no interest in that. I don’t really want to change anything from what I experienced in reality.
Tell me more about your gallery project, Space to Breathe…
My wife Sophie (a former director of Impressionist and Modern Art at Sotheby’s) and I moved to Scotland from London with our two children in 2018. Bowhouse, near St Monans, is a food producers’ market, and as soon as we walked into the building, I thought: ‘This would be an amazing art gallery’. We held a retrospective of my landscape photography there in 2022. The problem was how to show the work, as there are no partition walls. In the end, we used about a mile of steel cable to suspend everything from the ceiling. We saw it as a practical solution, we didn’t really anticipate how well it would work. We launched Space to Breathe together the following summer and have worked with some amazing artists: Andy Goldsworthy, Sheila Girling, Susan Derges. This summer’s show is Making Waves, Breaking Ground, featuring 11 artists.
Your work in Making Waves, Breaking Ground is a bit of a departure…
I’ve been making studies of smoke. I’ve built a whole system in my studio to photograph smoke. I think of them as landscapes of light. We don’t see light, and we don’t see air, but they are the two most fundamental things to our existence. They look like galaxies – I call them Smoke Nebula.
Describe a typical day.
There isn’t such a thing! If I’m in the studio working with smoke, that’s very different to working outside. The landscape work is done in very concentrated periods. Now I’m involved in Space to Breathe, that’s a whole other world.
What are the most enjoyable/least enjoyable parts of the job?
Because Sophie and I do everything, we have to be quite good at doing a lot of things. You have to do things like promotion and marketing, which come less naturally to me. I love when an exhibition goes up. Sharing an exhibition with people and seeing their reactions is really special.
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given?
Work hard. I asked Sheila Girling (the widow of sculptor Anthony Caro) about the secret of his great productivity. She said: if he had an idea at 3am, by 9am he would be in the studio working on that idea. Doing is good. It’s easy to procrastinate, to be afraid of failure.
What’s the first work of art you remember seeing?
I grew up with a lot of art because my dad was a collector, He had a very big, very good painting by John Hoyland – it’s in our sitting room now. My whole life I’ve been looking at that picture, and I could look at it for ten lifetimes.
If you could own any work of art by any artist, what would it be?
I wouldn’t mind a Mark Rothko, for reasons I can’t explain I find them mesmerising.
Has a work of art ever changed your life?
When I was at RIT, I remember walking past one of the professors’ offices and seeing two big mounted photographs behind his desk. One was an Ansel Adams landscape and the other was by photojournalist Eugene Smith, from Minamata in Japan, where he lived for two years photographing the effects of mercury poisoning. I just stood and stared at these two kinds of photography: pure art and photojournalism. It was a fork in the road. I knew what I had to do.
Who or what inspires you?
I’m married to my inspiration. Sophie has a wonderful eye and a wonderful understanding and knowledge of art.
What are you excited about?
I’m very pleased to be showing work in PhotoDalkeith (Dalkeith Palace, 30 Aug – 5 Sep). And I have lots of ideas about how to take the Smoke Nebula work forward. I’m realising I’m more and more excited by the concept of light as a subject. And in September, Sophie and I will sit down and start thinking about the next Space to Breathe exhibition.
Making Waves, Breaking Ground, an exhibition by Space to Breathe, is at Bowhouse, St Monans, until Aug 31. For more information visit www.spacetobreatheexpo.com
