The longevity of photography as a creative medium is, I believe, a result of its ability to be many things to many different people. My own interest in photography stems from the paradox of it being a recording medium and its ability to reveal, or capture, something unseen at the time of recording. This relates both to my degree work investigating family photographs and my current work based around a cellar and its objects. The fact that this paradox operates across both documentary and abstract work suggests that it is something latent in photography itself.

In the work around family photographs the revelation was primarily narrative-based, e.g. when a simple family photograph is transfigured by the knowledge that it was of a mother who killed her husband after finding out he had been abusing her children. In the cellar work, from which most of my current is selected, it is the presences (blurred but distinct faces, bodies, filmic associations, etc.) revealed by pinhole photographs of a cellar’s objects: it is almost as if the pinholes had captured and frozen the hidden being within the object.

For me, photography is drawn towards the unseen. As such, my role is to be a medium for the unseen by using photography.

Paul Haffenden