I approached this series in a quasi-scientific way. I did not anticipate what the subjects of the photographs would be but tried to react to the world about me as spontaneously as I could. Then, treating the images as raw ‘data’, I began to collate and organise them into significant patterns – all the while asking myself such questions as why I considered one photograph more successful than another, and why I retained one while dismissing another. As I monitored the growing body of images I was struck by the connections emerging between certain pairs of photographs. It was as if one picture was affecting another, and I was reminded of a phrase used in physics: ‘spooky action at a distance’. The photographs I paired had been taken on quite separate occasions and had strictly nothing to do with each other, and yet nevertheless they now appeared inextricably entangled. How could I have ever considered the images to be entirely unrelated? Why did this surprise me? This is not a scientific experiment, and I cannot attempt to quantify the effect one photograph has on another. But as I reflect on my observations of how one image may determine a property of another, new clues as to what may have motivated the work begin to emerge, and I start to feel that, in its own peculiar way, photography can be a way to knowledge.
