When I meet new clients, they often ask ‘how long have you been a photographer?’ as if the number of years practicing a skill is the only deciding factor in producing great work. A photographers skill and ability to create beauty is derived from more than just his tricks with a Hasselblad H-series, his scary strobe setup, or the ability to photoshop the model onto a whale in 25 minutes. Skill is derived through a much more indepth process. A lot has to do with a very subjective and sometimes very vague concept of artistic taste. But broader than this concept, is the idea of a photographers ‘way of seeing’. This particular way of seeing is influenced by years of absorbing and digesting images, conversations, senses, ideas and messages. The millions of commercial messages through advertising, thousands of movies and television programs, hundreds of books, dozens of art exhibitions, music lyrics, and childhood photo albumns. These all help to shape a particular vision of the world, which is a photographers ‘point of view’. His point of view affects all the decisions when he produces images, from the subject matter (I don’t shoot a lot of wildlife, for instance) the approach a photographer takes to choosing a subject to shoot (what the photographer sees as beautiful and as good taste), and choosing the treatment and visual style that he think ‘clicks’ internally with what he’s shooting and how he’s trying to represent an idea.

I’ve taken some time to document some of the most influential pieces that I think have helped to construct my own way of seeing, and act heavily on the way I create images. There are probably many more cultural and social unconscious decisions taken in the photography process, but here are a the few I can recall, starting when I was in high-school.

96-2000. Highscool. Subscription to the National Geographic from Mom wanted to get me to read more stuff. First camera. Took Photos of an immature nervous beauty: Landscapes, Puddles, textures, Bricks. Grass. Dogs. Everything. Had no vision whatsoever. But maybe not inhibited. Shot everything. My first model, Margot. Developing in the dark-room. Wasting film reels. Shot of a log on the beach. The sickness of overproducing. Shots of pottery figures and radios. Started writing soppy stuff about pets and surfing. Sister says I have some talent at it, why don’t I study at Rhodes. Biblical Metaphors. Music by MIC. Grahamstown Festival Flyers. Photographs of my grandfather’s 70th birthday vignetted. Words. The Bible. A brief Introduction to Pop art in Art school. Daft Punk Videos. Dancing with my cousin. Classical Music. Lots of Sting and the police. Roxanne. Walking on the Moon video by the Police. Musical craziness. Playing guitar, drums. Highschool rock bands recorded on tape, the Pixies over and over.

2001-2004 – First Years at University. Quirky notes from girlfriend Bronwen left under my res door. Fervent spiritual songs. Jamming Guitar. The Rhodes Music Library. Rachmaninov. Jazz at the Beethoven Theatre. Printing stuff on my medication. My sisters poetry large format on the church walls. First images found of Henri Cartier-Bresson. Jean Paul Satre. Nausea. Photo-coping hundreds of war images from Richard Avedon in the Rhodes Library. Long emails from Girlfriend in Tom Stoppard style.Radiohead O.K. Computer. The grungy lyrics on paper. Stream of consciousness in the library. Stephen Pinker on Language. Psycho-analysis, Freud and JungThat book about the woman with Obessive period.Toaism. Dua-tse Chung. Dali and surrealism.  More Robert Avedon. War Imagery. Shots of people on the battlefield. World War. D-Day. Aushwitz. Cartoon books ‘Maus”. Film List with new Girlfriend, like. Pie. The raw gruesomeness. Brain in the drain. Mental. Requiem for a Dream. The Medium is the Message – short graphic novel by Marshall Mclaun. Paul Sassier – Encoding and Decoding messages. Semiotics and Post-structuralism. Introductions to Barthe. Modern Fiction and Borges Labryths. Post-Modernist. Umbeto Eco. Reams of Symbols. Finding the messages. Dada. Truama Art. T.S. Eliot – Lovesong for Alfred Prufrock. Sylvia Plath. Her vicerality. Fat watch. Modernists poets. Who were essentially imagists. Beat Movement.  Video Art in Amalie. Matisse and Surrealism. Lots of words. Buying the worlds largest dictionary. Paul Klee. Formalism. Colors. The eye-ball kick. The simplicity. Shapes and Tones. Mark Rothko. Plays by Tom Stoppard. Kleinzieght. Existentialistm. Albert Camu. Video Artists. Sleep. Writing strange songs decompositional sounds. The Rudimentals. My crazy Isreali friends on reason 3. Photos of my dashboard. Textures. Photo of a spade taken in transkie. Excavators and Bulldozers. Lots of time in nature. More TS Eliot

2004-2006 – Dubai & London Working in Dubai for a corporate trying to take over the world. Gross Materialism. Rendering huge projects. Money with no bounds. Freda – Movie about Freda Khalo. Branding with Landor. Worlds tallest building. 180 skyscrapers. Cairo Developments. Saudi Developments. India Developments. Burj Dubai Branding with Pentagram and Gorgio Armani. Photos of hands. Prints of hands. The Financial Times. Value Creation books with Buffet. Rueters Building in London. Canary Wharf in london. Exploring a european city. Creating a new Downtown. Creating a new culture downtown. London. The vespa scooter in the science museum. The Tate Modern. Kandinsky and Abstract Expressionism. Kill Bill 2. Lots of youTubing.

2007-2009 Cape Town. The exteme cultural experience of having a Opera soprano as a girlfriend. Through the line thinking with Big Ideas with Advertising agencies in Cape Town. Integrated design strategy. Marketing by Seth Godin. Movie: Paris – I love you. The Reader. The motorcycle diaries. Stranger than Fiction. Wes Anderson Movies. Quirkiness. Daarling Limited. Artist girlfriend with crazy sculptures. David Le Chapelle. You me and everyone we know – photos of her feet. South African Photographer Peiter Hugo Hyaena images and Images of Nollywood. Annie Leibovitz movie about photographer. But the photos she took of her child playing in the garden with the flowers. Didn’t like any of her commercial stuff. Ellen von Onworth. Lavatza Calendar. Alain Fletcher – the Art of Seeing sideways. Ways of Seeing – John Berger. Paul Rand. Paul Cezane – men playing cards. Information Architecture . Visual Complexity. Quinten Taritino – Death Proof. Models in the cars. Architecture of Happiness – Alain de Bottain. The Monocle Editorial Shots. FFFFound.com. PSFK website. William Kentridge sketches of coal mines and joburg. Corrine Day. Model with dirty feet. Terry Richardson and images of Pamela Anderson and Images in the GQ. He shoots celebs doing mad stuff. Mostly sucking his ****. Jeurgen Teller discovered his LV photos in the TANK magazine. Susan Sontag’s ‘On Photography’ . The Snap-Shot aesthetic. The 90’s, images of the Decade. Richard Avedon Beauty images. Beatnik Writers – Allen Ginsberg. On the Road – Jack Keurac. The Kooks. Bloc Party. MGMT. Adidas commercials. JJJJound.com. 7 days in the Artworld. Soul – ID. Designers and Creatives write about real subjects. Tank Magazine. More Polaroids. Science of Sleep video art. Finding a voice. Discover my Mode of shooting. Way that can take an idea and develop it visually.  My Workflow. Sketching out shots. Simplest possible way of shooting. Great idea. Bob Dylan movie – I’m not there. The scenes on white. Blogs, more blogs, lots of fashion magazines. More TANK magazine editorials. Obsessive about lighting setups. Blogs about extreme lighting Experiments. Chris Cunningham Gucci Advert. Models.com