Street photography assignments… Hours traipsing around, waiting for something to happen, a slow oil leak on the engine of imagination. It does damage, over time. I can feel it.

Street photography strips me bare. I can not re-light the scene or change the position of the sun (or change the weather completely). Nor can I re-arrange the figures in my frame into positions and actions that will communicate something of meaning to the audience. I can not wet down the streets or clear background, or fill the air with smoke; all of which might sound like unreasonable requests but are the norm in my constructed worlds.

All I have control over is where I put my lens; the same lens that everyone else has, on the same streets many others have shot. With all these ghosts of photography past, how will my shots be different? What value do they have? How is this Art?

Odd questions coming from someone embarking on a Photojournalism Masters. Street Photography, in essence, is a photojournalist’s stock and trade. I knew it would be a challenge, that it would make me work much, much harder to find the extraordinary in the everyday. That’s why I did it, to sharpen my eye. But it takes a toll.

Constructed visual worlds are pure creation, there are no limits, not anymore. Our technology has developed to the point where I can conjur up a beast from my mind and present it to you and you will know it is real. This is an addictive way to pass the time. We spend day after day in black boxes building worlds from the ground up. For months we do not see natural daylight, entering the studio before dawn and leaving well after the winter sun has set… How excited we all were, with such unbound enthusiasm for creation but this child’s play comes at a cost.

The film ‘Inception’ may appear to be a story about a man on the run for mind control espionage but in truth it’s about a director torn between the worlds he creates and the real world where his children are. In the story, the lead character and his wife – in real life the director’s wife is also his producer – spend years wandering together, building their own universes, addicted to the thrill of creating like gods. It’s only the nagging realization that their children are waiting for them in the real world that breaks the spell and brings them back. You can not be here and there at the same time… therein lies the rub.

The illusion is seamless, losing yourself inside is inevitable. My totem is a simple truth; anything that truly means anything is outside that black box. Everyone I am trying to communicate to through what I create inside is on the outside.

So six days a week I spend in the black box and on the seventh I am here, in the real world, wandering… trying not to be lost.