 Behind each of these titles is four images, all related to the title theme. Although some of the individual images could stand on their own, they have all been selected because they work as part of a quartet of similar images. To me, each group of four explores and reflects and reinforces the subject better than a single image could or would. They are the result of carrying a camera almost everywhere I go, and of always being open to possibilities, to the spur of the moment, to the interesting details above and below the normal eye line. I hope you like the idea as much as I do. |
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 These and a myriad other fragments of this old city seemed to insist that I notice and record them. A colour against a texture next to a shape, and there!... is another image. What are they fragments of? It doesn’t matter. What do they mean? Nothing, except that I collect them and to me each one is a pleasing balance of shape and colour and form and texture. They seem to satisfy some need in me to find order in the world for reasons I have stopped trying to understand. I don’t know what to call them, but like Marcel Duschamps’ ‘objets trouvé’ they already existed, so perhaps they should be ‘conceptions trouv é‘ – or because these ones were collected in Italy, ‘disegni trovato’. ‘Found designs’ isn’t a good description though, because the word ‘found’ implies I was looking for them. I don’t especially look for these abstract images, they just seem to be all around me everywhere I go. |
 The windows and doors of a building are not just exterior features, they are connections that reflect the function of the interior spaces, and these functions change over time. What was a hallway is now a storage space; two bedrooms become one sitting room, or vice versa; a bigger kitchen means moving the front door onto the street a metre to the left; and so on. A fascinating thing about Italy is that builders rarely seem to make any attempt to disguise the effect of these renovations on the outside of a building. Almost every wall bears the scars in its surface of where doors and windows used to be but are no longer. Centuries of renovation history and changing taste in window design can be detected and traced in these lingering remnants – these ‘ghosts’ of former doors and windows. |
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