From the Darkroom to the 'Photoshop'.

I have been taking photographs for over 20 years. My early love of black and white photography and the things that I have accomplished with that medium have for the past three years now been more and more overshadowed by my new passion for digital colour photography. The work on this site covers both my early black and white and colour work quite well but there is a large & steadily increasing contingent of more recent digital colour work. I would like to think that these works exhibit a sense of the history of fine art photography; in particular the influence's of Laszlo Moholy -Nagy, Walker Evans, Helmut Newton and Ansel Adams to name a few.

While I am inclined to believe that printing your own black and white is great training for the eye, digital photography is a liberation indeed. Many of the colour images on this web site and all the images in the exhibition gallery have been produced on a small canon ixus camera (the nice one with all the manual overrides). Digital is going to change the face of photography but it won't be because you can 'fix' the photo in the computer (you can't). I feel it's the ability to shoot so freely with digital that will create a more experienced (and perhaps liberated?) photographer. Of course there is going to be an enormous pile of the 'average', but did hanging out at the mini lab ever substitute for a visit to a good exhibition?

Right now I am happily taking photographs within walking distance of my home. Marrickville in Sydney 's inner west constantly amazes me. How often is it possible to pass something without noticing its beauty or its uniqueness? Shooting within a couple of blocks of home is like restricting the choice of colours on the palette. Acquiring intimate knowledge, familiarity grows, you start doing things you never knew were possible.

If you have read this far, thank you and please feel free to drop me a line. I must also mention that I feel extremely fortunate to have had what I amounts to a superb apprenticeship. I received great training both at the Queensland College of Art and as assistant to a number of extremely talented photographers. I hope you enjoy my work. I will try to update the web site with new work and exhibitions with some degree of regularity .

Kent Johnson , Sydney 2003