London/Manchester - Old Work Revisited

Dog Walkers - The Fallowfield Loop

The Fallowfield Loop is an interesting pathway that runs south of Manchester. Moving from the South West it pretty much run up toward the North East of the city, and I was fortunate to live right in the middle of it. 

During Summer 2010 on various cycle trips up and down the stretch I noticed the number of people taking their dogs for walks, all various breeds, sizes and shapes but I kind of appreciated the community that was there between the walkers. 

It was this I wanted to photograph, and also look into the relationship between dog and human. I later found out about an artist, Keith Arnatt, who's work in the 70's looks at this same thing and other series. 

Here is mine, a small series that is not reached its peak, I want to continue working it and make a hardback book of it within the next year.

June 2011 - Work

Right now I'm happy to continue working within portraiture, I've discussed it before but I never really touched on portraits before this point because I thought my eyes were... not trained enough, unskilled, to make whatever I do with portraits worthwhile.
I think you can master different areas of photography a lot easier than you can with portraiture, due to their being someone else involved.


I've been working with males and I'm going to continue that, a lot more in face, however alongside that I want to photograph couples, real life couples, strangers coupled together, same sex duos. I think it's my curiosity to delve into the lives of others, and  to just see how for myself how people react together in front of the camera, in front of me.
I'm learning things, and photography is a great way to learn.

The plan for these frames are to create a 'moving image' in the method of a Graphics Interchange Format. You could probably get a better result from shooting this on a different medium such as a super8 or a video camera, but what I wanted to do was by using a roll of 24 exposure film, capture the subtle movements of my sitter. By keeping the camera positioned on a tripod and asking the sitter not to move anything other than their neck, head, arms and shoulders, I could get this moving image by compiling the 24 frames.

I also had other intentions to have the images appear over exposed, so exposed they almost blend into their landscapes.

I seemed to have the same problem with Andrew's shoot and Matthew's shoot with the film not being wounded on correctly at the end of being exposed, meaning edges of the film got fogged. 

Fortunately enough I don't feel that strong about these images.

Matthew Carter

Influences and Revisits

It's not always just photographers that influence my camera eye. Sources can come from sculpture, painting, fine arts, music, artwork, words and other sources. I'm going to include some of those sources here every now and then.  I won't concentrate on that heavily but a post here of there that is fundamental to the work being produced will have a section for itself.

I also realised I have a lot of unseen material, from past work, or from my earlier photography days. There might not be much conceptuality within the images that will follow but I will entitle them old times-revisited.

I have some lovely ideas being drawn up, as soon as I get the time I will get them on here.

Eyes