Bard Hill - Photographs by Peter Boorman

I trained as an archaeologist and began my photographic career when I combined working on archaeological excavations with the photography that had fascinated me as a child. Working as the photographer on digs and recording finds took me to Iraq and Ecuador in the 1980s, and to sites all over my home country, the UK. Later a career change to banking, risk analysis and project management saw photography take a back seat, but a desire to return to more creative activity led me back to it in 1999.

My stock in trade includes studio work, still life, and garden photography but my passion is for pictorial landscapes, flowers, and unusual perspectives on architecture. I shoot formats up to 5”x7”, but my most used equipment is Pentax 35mm - having been a Pentax user since my teens - Exacta 66 medium format , and the Hasselblad X-Pan panoramic system.

I am a Licentiate of the British Institute of Professional Photography, and I draw much of my inspiration from the big skies of England’s North Essex countryside, where I live with my three legged cat ‘Damson’.

A photograph is not a copy of reality: if it were it would not be very interesting, and it would certainly not be ‘art’.

Like any two dimensional picture it is a representation of ‘a reality’ that is meaningful only in the way it affects the viewer. If it is to be art that effect must involve the emotions as well as the purely analytical part of the mind that says “this is a picture of a flower.” It must at the very least make the viewer think “this picture makes me feel something that I would not have felt simply seeing the flower itself.”

The photograph must add something new to the reality it portrays, and that can come only from the photographer. Finding that extra something is the challenge that keeps me taking pictures.