Learning Through Influence

Photographer Sebastião Salgado was known for his campaigning environmental and social reportage. When challenged to emulate the work of Salgado I turned to the Donkey Field planning application campaign. This panel shows access to redundant Mod areas and the donkey field and contrasts that with the barbed wire enclosed data centres and the locked up victorian mine entrance.

Photography can be a vital outlet when life demands everything you have. Created for a self-portrait challenge, The Future is Memory reflects a reality I cannot separate from my own: my role as the primary carer for my wife as she lives with dementia. While these three images capture the progression and weight of her mental illness, the process of making them was equally critical to my own mental health—forcing me to confront the silent strain of caregiving while offering a creative space to process it.

Inspired by the documentary and humanist approach of Phil Penman, I set out not to imitate his style, but to explore what his way of seeing could teach me about my own visual instincts. His work reminds me that quiet, ordinary moments can carry deep emotional weight — and that the stories we tell through photography don’t always require faces or action. My chosen set reflects a personal response to themes of age, memory, presence, and stillness. In the triptych of hands, I explore physical gesture as a language of experience — of care, of waiting, of touch. The second image, showing an empty mobility scooter in sunlight, stands for absence and the traces people leave behind. Finally, the seated man in the armchair offers a moment of solitary reflection — not isolated, but at ease in stillness. Across all three images, I’ve aimed for clarity, balance, and restraint. Inspired by Penman’s compositional patience and tonal discipline, I’ve tried to craft images that are visually quiet but emotionally resonant — images that pause, rather than push.

This project explores the lessons I took from Simon Ellingworth's challenge based on the work of Bill Brant. Rather than attempting to imitate Brant's photographs, I was inspired by his ability to see the ordinary as something fresh, strange and poetic. The centrepiece of this project is a series of landscapes created from nothing more than piles of flour. Through careful lighting, viewpoint and monochrome processing they become mountains, glaciers and moonlit scenes, inviting the viewer to question their first impression. Familiar objects lose their identity and take on an entirely new meaning. The remaining images continue this exploration through form, shadow, texture and atmosphere, seeking beauty in everyday subjects and encouraging a more subjective way of seeing. The project is less about recording reality than about transforming it, discovering how imagination can emerge from the simplest of materials. The challenge taught me to look beyond what an object is, and instead ask what it might become.

After looking at the work of Nick Brandt and observing several changes in his style of work our challenge for week 1 was to "Reinvent Ourselves". To decide what we want to achieve and to apply it to our chosen genre. I chose to do some "street" photography within the confines of Wadswick Green.

For this Mono Challenge assignment — "What can Michael Kenna teach you about your photography?" — I explored Kenna's signature minimalist style, applying it to still life rather than landscape. Searching for simple, graphic forms, I found unexpected inspiration in a charity shop: a box of dominos. Their stark black and white geometry, subtle textures, and quiet sense of order echoed Kenna's meditative approach, translating his minimalism into a tabletop world.

This panel traces the changing identity of a single landscape in rural Wiltshire — from Victorian mine workings to wartime camps, post-war abandonment, and today's threat of industrial redevelopment. Inspired by the observational approach of Sebastião Salgado, the images focus on the marks left by human activity: fences, ruins, rewilded paths, and rising new barriers. Shot in black and white, the work reflects on how land is shaped, forgotten, and claimed again.

For this session, the challenge was to see what I could learn from, not emulate, Garry Winogrand. His photographs capture the chaos, humour, and humanity of the street with instinct and curiosity rather than control. I took that mindset onto the streets of Corsham, working quickly and reacting to whatever appeared in front of me. The resulting images explore how chance, timing, and observation

Inspired by Joakim Möller, this submission explores new ways of working with my archive. Möller's use of emotional interconnection, minimalism, and the absence of formal structure encouraged me to treat older images as raw material for new narratives.