This video mirrors my own views very much about why we create photographs, and what is most important in tending our creative lives.

I have for many years now, thought that photography is actually a very private endeavour. We do it because we cannot not do it. We do it because it enriches our experience of life in some way that, if we didn’t do it any more, we would feel something was missing.

And yet it is very easy to get a bit lost. To start to believe that we are making images to build an audience, or to show others what we saw. I never first picked up a camera for any of these reasons, and neither did you.

I think it is always worth trying to reconnect to your very first impulses for buying a camera and making images. In this video, we see that Vivian Maier made images for one sole reason: because it provided something in her life that she would have been lost without.

I really do think that photography is a private endeavour. I know that might seem like a huge contradiction from someone who foolishly listened to his friends when they said ‘you should go professional’. If I were not running a photography business, I would be perfectly happy now, not having a website and not sharing my work. I’ve been though 14 years of having people tell me all sorts of nice/weird/wonderful things about my imagery. As variable as the feedback has been, there has always been one constant: and that is me. I make images for myself, and you do to, and to believe otherwise is a deception.

If you go back and think about why you picked up a camera in the first place, then you will understand what I mean.