About Mark Emmerson

I am a stout believer in the apprenticeship approach to learning, photography included. Time spent in the classroom provides scant reward compared to time spent in the laboratory honing the art and attendant skills. In photography the lab is everywhere a camera can be taken. The darkroom of film is now a computer. Despite the plethora of schools, seminars and lecturing gurus, nothing supplants practical, hands-on experience, experimentation and the refinement of skills, instincts and judgement. Having successfully applied the same basic approach in a number of other endeavours I know this is not a one-off wonder. Nonetheless, I learn most efficiently that way. It is a never ending process. It favours dynamism, evolution, accreting ideas and abhors the static "comfort zones", those familiar, safe, unchallenging precincts of the adventure-averse, that are early casualties. After a while, the fear factor, self doubt - crises of confidence - attenuate and new territories become more familiar and commonplace. Among the great benefits of being a hands-on learner is that one becomes very confident in one's innate abilities to work out a problem, frequently with help and by calling on previous problem-solving techniques. I would even suggest that, apart from the visual gratification, it is the problem-solving dimensions of photography that have attracted and then held my interest. The visual dimension is largely instinctive, the rest cerebral.

If I may indulge in some rebellion against much of the contemporary custom in photography, you won't find me prattling on about camera gear or software. Nor will you find soaring words about art, artists, being an artist, or emotive passages seeking to substitute passion for substance. There is much more to photography than pressing the button with an enthusiastic but essentially "Hail Mary" hope, even if the button is attached to a Hasselblad. Luck, opportunity and gear play a part but rarely out-perform a good eye with quality behind it as well as in front.

So you now have a flavour of the mind-set underpinning my photographic endeavours. In five years, perhaps two, I might have a different take - such is the nature of the never-ending learning process. If you like what you see in these galleries, by all means savour it because in a similar time frame they, too, might have moved on. If you don't like what is there now, despair not, a new generation of images will arrive, hopefully more to your liking.