40 photgraphs made whilst thinking about painting

A look back at a photographic essay I made in 2011

Part of doing this is to start a deeper look at my understanding of what I think painting is, and what it could be.

I came to painting in an odd way, through photography. For a long time I was doing both, but with a strong direction towards photography.

So I didn’t know it at the time, but this was the last photo essay I would make in this way. I would usually have my camera with me all the time, making images constantly, building up bodies of photographs that I would collect into essays to show.

I was interested in making photography with possibilities rather than a definite agenda, something that has now completely taken over photography through teaching and commercial acceptance. I was working in the style of sixties street photographers, building connections between images that could form larger essays.

With this work, I dropped a lot of what I had been trying to achieve in those essays and focused more on thinking through looking. As I became more interested in abstraction in painting, these photographs became more like a sketchbook of ideas and possibilities. Some were images that didn’t get used and needed somewhere to go. Or maybe I was finally letting go of trying to say something important.

Looking back, I can see this as a point where I stepped away from the restraints of one medium, ready to step into the constraints of another , although I didn’t think that at the time.

These photos say much more about photography than they do about painting. Maybe it was about letting go, or maybe about creating a kind of freedom for the images themselves.

I once spoke to Peter Fraser, who gave me some advice about having a point of purpose. But for me, these photographs are about rejecting that advice and framing them as images made whilst thinking about something else, letting them exist without the baggage of another world. A world I was ready to leave.

What I see in this collection now is a body of work resisting being turned into something else.

That’s how I see my paintings now a flow between looking, making, thinking, and repeating, each time with new insights.

I looked back at how this work was originally presented and have put it back as it appeared in 2011.A lot of my essays existed as website pages.Now everything sits inside templates, it felt right to show it like this again.

.https://mikeryderpainter-create.github.io/old-site-archive/photo-painting.html