Interview for Nowhere Diary
October 31, 2023Interview conducted for Nowhere Diary - I didn’t realise when I did the interview that it would be posted behind a paywall to make money for them…
So here it is, for free, if anyone wants to kill a good 10 minutes ;) ….
NWD; What is your backstory?
AD; I graduated from Edinburgh College of Art with a First Class Hons BA in Photography way back in 2016. After graduating I went travelling for about 5 years, living and working in Japan, New Zealand, Canada and France, and travelling in other countries in between, before finally returning to the UK to undertake my MA in Documentary Photography. I completed my MA late last year and have been focussing on getting the work that I completed as a part of my MA into exhibitions and photo festivals since (while also working as a commercial photographer). I’ve also been working on editing the work into a book form that will hopefully be published next year.
NWD; What camera gear/editing setup do you use?
I predominantly use film/analogue cameras for most of my personal work/projects and so editing is really kept to a minimum. I started off by using my dad’s old box brownie when I was in the first year of my undergraduate. I was photographing a community of people who all lived in treehouses just outside of Edinburgh at the time and the focus on the camera was one of those ones that you have to estimate and judge the distance yourself. This proved quite difficult to get the hang of while hanging out of trees and off rope ladders, so a lot of my first foray into film was filled with out-of-focus or blurred shots and disappointment. But I’m very glad I persisted with film photography as it’s what’s kept me coming back to working on photographic projects again and again over the years.
Throughout my time at Edinburgh University, I’d progressed up the film sizes, working a lot on 5x4 (4x5 in the US) sheet film and was lucky enough to be able to use a 10x8 camera for my final year project. The magic of working on such a large scale of sheet film is really incomparable.
However beautiful large format cameras are though, they’re always heavy and with the price of film nowadays they’re super expensive to use. So, I now stick mostly to medium format, either my little Mamiya645 - a purchase from 2014 that I used for all my work documenting the communities of Sandtown in West Baltimore USA, or my slightly larger Mamiya RB67 that has been my recent travel buddy to Peru for my masters project and more recently on my trip to Ghana in West Africa.
I pretty much try to get everything correct in camera when I shoot. I have to sit at my computer enough for grant writing or editing commercial work so try to keep editing on my personal projects to an absolute minimum. Just a bit of dust spotting, adjusting the levels or colour balancing at most.
NWD; How do you achieve the look of your photographs and could you take us through the process?
AD; This is a slightly tricky question as I’ve always felt that I’ve struggled to have a distinct style of sorts. For a long time, I was convinced (wrongly) that black and white was just for people who couldn’t shoot colour (please don’t come after me, I no longer think this!). I now love shooting black and white and have a small darkroom in my bedroom where I develop and print from my black and white films.
I guess the analogue nature of most of my images contributes greatly to their aesthetics. The way of shooting with an analogue camera is just so completely different to digital. Alongside being mindful of the cost of each frame you take, the process itself (especially with the larger formats of analogue film) require the photographer to slow down and really consider their subject before pressing the shutter.
I think considering the work of other photographers and artists always has a big effect on the aesthetics of my work as well. I remember the first photography book I ever bought was Andrei Tarkovsky’s ‘Instant Light’ book of polaroids, I was obsessed in light and the magical transformative effects it can have on subjects. The classics like Joseph Sudek definitely taught me a lot about the magical ways in which subtle, natural light could transform everyday objects into these marvellous otherworldly forms.
Nowadays I definitely place equal, if not more, time and emphasis on thinking about the context and contextualisation of my images, how the photograph will be read, within what context it will be viewed, and the ethics surrounding all of this (especially when working with diverse or sometimes marginalised groups of peoples).
NWD; Could you tell us the backstory of some of your photographs?
So a lot of the images I’ve shown here are from one of my most recent projects, entitled ‘Peeling the Paris Green’. This was a project that involved a lot of research and really developed my ideas around how photography could be used to really investigate a topic beyond the tangible/immediately visible.
In the project, Peeling The Paris Green, the growing debate between agroecology; a more holistic approach to agriculture, and, gene-editing; a scientific method used to create new plants and crops, are investigated as solutions to the growing issue of global food insecurity. This contentious debate is expressed through an in-depth, rhizomatic, and research-based photographic investigation of the humble potato.
Brought to Europe on the ships of the Spanish conquistadors only some 400 years ago, the potato has since spread throughout the world. An integral part of most countries’ national cuisine, it is the 4th most important food crop after grains and cereals. It is argued by many historians to have been the cause of the population rise in 17th and 18th century Europe that then allowed for the Industrial Revolution to take place. And it now plays an integral part in the battle for food sovereignty in the face of giant agribusiness.
The potato’s interwoven history within the growth of the agricultural industrial complex is alluded to within the very title of the project, Paris Green. Paris Green, also known by its chemical name; copper acetoarsenite. Is an inorganic compound made with arsenic and copper that, although initially invented as a paint pigment, inadvertently became one of the first mass-produced insecticides. This, along with a number of other pesticides, gave rise to the agrochemical industry that today wields so much power.
The narratives that are wound together in this complex story of the humble spud, from its birthplace in the Peruvian Andes, where its biodiversity is kept safe by the communities of the indigenous-led Parque de la Papa (the Potato Park), through the archives of The British Potato Collecting Expedition, which then became The Commonwealth Potato Collection; the UK’s only landrace potato genebank. To The Sainsbury Laboratory, a genetic engineering laboratory in Norwich and The International Potato Centre in Lima, that both have ties to agribusiness giants; Bayer and The Gates Foundation.
The genre of photography utilized within this project is as broad and rhizomatic as the subject itself, as it questions photography’s inability to say anything about labor relations or underlying capitalist mechanisms of, in this case, the food industry. Consequently, the project is told through a mixture of discernibly disparate visuals, mixing more classic colour documentary with black and white surrealist still life constructs, that disrupt the narrative storytelling that is all too familiar within documentary photography.
This is the work I’m hoping to publish as a monograph at some point in the near future with the newly founded @orange_press_ in Edinburgh. There are more details on the specific images available on my instagram, my website, or, on @photoworks_uk where I recently did a takeover.
NWD; Where do you see yourself as a photographer in 10 years from now?
AD; I would absolutely love to be teaching photography in Universities alongside my own practice. I think I always shied away from the idea of teaching because of that horrible saying “’Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach’. It’s an absolute farce of a saying, that I recently found out originates from a 1905 play by George Bernard Shaw. Considering that in 1905 women still didn’t have the right to vote and most people probably still thought that it was a good idea to put butter on a burn, I can quite safely say this saying is absolute bull.
I think teaching is one of the best ways to stay involved in the development and evolution of a subject/photography. I recently had the opportunity to give some guest lectures at Universities and absolutely loved how much the preparation and creation of the lectures I was giving added to my ideas and thoughts around my own practice and perception of photography as a subject.
NWD; Where do you see photography versus AI in 10 years from now?
AD; If anything, I kind of hope that AI will help renew the interest in analogue photography. When photography was first invented, artists and especially painters began to panic that it would render painting obsolete. And yes, people began to rely less on painters to produce their likeness, but this didn’t cause an end to painting. If anything, it pushed painting into a more solidified art form.
Either way, I hate to be that person but… there’s no AI and no photography on a dead planet - a reason a lot of my work is concerned with the climate crisis.
I think as I get older I become increasingly disenchanted with a photography and art world that pretends that it is part of a noble cause, “raising awareness” of important social issues, while in reality, it is quietly quite often a contributing cause of them.
I was recently asked by Art Partner to produce an interview for them on what it was like getting an honerable mention and be exhibited by them for their collaboration with COP27 (an intergovernmental climate summit). I replied that it had felt gutting to find out that 18 out of the 20 sponsors of COP27 had ties to the fossil fuel industry. Needless to say, they didn’t publish my interview.
NWD; What advice do you have for aspiring photographers?
AD; I think making project work really helped me. It’s all very well to take nice photos of random things but it’s a whole other ball game being able to use them cohesively to investigate or better understand a specific subject. So for people at the real beginning of their photography journey I’d suggest starting by picking a subject and working around understanding it better through the creation of visual language and imagery.
Alongside this, I’d have to say that the best advice I ever received was from one of my lecturers on my study abroad year at MICA in the USA. On the last day of term he bought this big filing box in and dumped it on his desk. Inside were hundreds and hundred of letters. “These are the rejection letters I received in my first year after graduation” he said.
Unless you have very well connected and wealthy parents/family, it is highly unlikely that someone is going to just notice your work and put you in a gallery/give you anything for it.
I know it’s maybe not a particularly inspiring story but it helped me a lot. Basically, collect rejection letters. If you collect enough rejection letters then the acceptance ones will slowly start to collect themselves.
