I used to think - or possibly merely hope - that my work had really developed over the last half-century or so. But, having looked afresh at my pictures as I selected images for this website, I have to say that I'm no longer quite so sure.
Because the picture shown here, made almost forty years ago, is still recognisably mine, and yet it was made when I was a pretty script disciple of that 'golden generation' of British documentarians, from Homer Sykes and Tony Ray-Jones to Chris Killip and Martin Parr.
But, as the years went on, it was twentieth century painting, as well modernism in many of its other artistic forms, that inspired much of my work. And later, in the 2010s, I discovered Japanese art, and the aesthetic philosophy that underpins it. That too soon became a guiding force.
And yet, when I look at that picture of a long-ago North Walian summer, it feels to me as if I'd make that picture in just the same way if I came upon it tomorrow. And that's despite all the time, thought and effort that I've expended in the last forty (admittedly enjoyable) years of photography.
Why is that? Partly, I suspect, because those of us that seek to express something of ourselves by making representations of the 'real world' are always limited by it. And I'll take that, not least because none of my photographic work - old or new - was made with the aid of AI, beyond cloning out some ancients dust spots.
So it seems that the Jesuits were right about one thing: the person we will become is already there, even in childhood. And so, when I first raised that plastic 127 Kodak Brownie to my eye at that Kentish summer fete, sometime around 1970, I already saw the world in much the same way as I do now.
As The Gourds so rightly sang: 'All my stories are about the same things.' Mine are too, for better or worse. And at best, all I can hope to do is to tell them in slightly different voices.
