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It came out from a piece of work that I did about 8 years ago called Abandoned that was looking at sites just in the UK
that had a military or social or political aspect to it. 3 years ago or so I started looking back at some of those pieces of work
the ones that had a military significance and it dawned on me how important this was as a piece of work
and I wanted to look at that further and that's how the work came out from there really.
As time passes they become more and more important, it's photographs of objects that were constructed 70 years ago
for a very different purpose, for the purpose of war. It's that idea that if you never get to see things from the past
you'll never understand the past, the old thing of having to understand your past to knowing your present
and your future as well, so it's almost as time passes and the memories of these histories fade and the people
involved all start to die off it's works like this that become more important each day.
As a photographer you think you want to have exhibitions in a more traditional style of photography gallery
but I think for me because of the work and the nature of the subject matter and it's quite a popular subject matter
it's important to reach and as diverse and audience as possible so to have it in a traditional gallery setting
then in a museum is perfect for me
obviously within that the armouries is the perfect museum because of the nature of what you hold here and the history.
It's an old large format film camera, it's the best one that suits the subject matter, it gives you a piece of film
that's 5 x 4 inches so it's the size of a postcard for a sheet of film. Really big piece of film and really beautiful prints
and the camera has certain technical movements in it that allow you keep verticals straight when
your shooting from low down or high up, all very technical but it does the job basically.
Because of the subject matter I try to shoot with soft subdued light, I don't really want to shoot at sunset or sunrise
to add any extra drama because I don't think the subject matter needs any more drama to it.
So I generally shoot in foggy, sea misty conditions or when you have very flat soft grey light,
and also where possible very early in the day so that there's no people in the images
but sometimes the time is dependent on the tide, there are some shots where I'm standing in the sea
to get the photograph and there's only so wet I want to get.
It's basically photographed from the beach and the sand dunes and there's a second image in the collection as well.
Interestingly enough this is near to where Donald Trump has been building his gold courses.
And it's one of the main defences built in Scotland, a lot of the reason,
I've learnt from my research, why they built them there was to make the German army think there
would be an invasion from Scotland hence a lot of the German army was positioned up towards
Denmark and Norway to cut off that threat.
And then from that there's huge links between Scotland and Norway which isn't necessarily
Newburgh but towards the Shetland Islands.
It's a beautiful stunning location, 3 times I went up to this location to get the photograph until the
tides and light and time of day were all perfect.
I was staying in a nearby hotel and I had to leave about 4.30 in the morning to get out there because it was
an hours walk to the location and I got downstairs and they'd locked the front door from the inside
so I couldn't get out and obviously this was 600 miles from home and I'd driven for a couple of days
and I wasn't going to not get the shot, so I had to break out of the hotel bar window with my rucksack and tripod
crawl through the barriers get the shot and get back in time for breakfast and explain to them why one of their windows was open.