In 2020 I delved into the highly specialised genre of product photography, or should I call it still life photography, that sounds a lot sexier! I'd never been against it, in fact back in 2006, London, I hoped to land a full time assistant job to a very successful one. I always figured that I would learn a great deal about lighting and commercial business but it wasn't to be.

The Japanese writer Murakami in his book Novelist As A Vocation, talked about different kinds of writers stepping into the boxing arena. Apparently novelists tend to respect those brave enough (or perhaps stupid enough) to enter the fight because the veterans want to see how long they'll stick around before throwing in the towel.

Murakami goes further, citing specialised writers, particularly those working in translation, as fierce defenders of a small arena, taking a dim view of newcomers as stealing what they see is rightfully theirs. The same can be said of specialised photographers who only do one genre.

So back to still life, I think when committing into something it is vital to look around yourself at what's going on, and, in terms of still life, I noticed photographers working on this genre were busy (and still are) strangling objects, performing strange rituals, photographing intersections of walls and seams on armchairs. I did try to make sense of it all and it made me reflect upon the nature of these ordinary conceptual types. Have we become so bored of photographing in an elegant manner that we have to resort to this? Is this the only interesting way? Is this the loss of reason in a neo-nihilistic age of unreasonable acts? The problem with conceptual art is that it is unfortunately full of bogus profundities, the pure result of too much Freudianism. For myself, I always loved the direct approach of Irving Penn in that respect, I think it did show still life for what it really is, cannibalistic, no more no less. Also, in this sense, I think still life is the most contemporary genre of photography, everything is reduced to photographing a product with little human intervention. This will advance so much that in the very near future we will not need humans at all, an object will take a photo of another object.

To be perfectly honest I did try to strangle a few objects, but it wasn't really for me and I instead went back to following my obsessions for my still life photographs as well. My pictures speak for themselves, and, as Andy Warhol would put it, there's really nothing behind them but I do thoroughly enjoy hearing what people have to say about them.