“Everything you own must be able to fit inside one suitcase; then your mind might be free.” ― Charles Bukowski,
Journeyman
(essay written for the introductory section of my art website)
A very good Chinese friend of mine, says “you are like a bird without feet”. By analogy she means my restlessness and inability to settle for long reminds her of an avian species that cannot land and by implication, has to keep moving on.
Fundamentally she is right. For while we agree, photographers by nature are fidgety, she knows my default is movement decoupled from home! Or to rephrase that. “Wherever I lay my head, that’s my home”
Since leaving my birthplace, Bradford, West Yorkshire, in 1975, at the age of twelve, for South Africa, I would vouch that for the ensuing 46 years I have been carefully constructing notions of belonging everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
Equally so, my career as a photographer has been tempered by many interests and agendas, played out in a variety of arenas. I’ve purposely chosen a varied professional career, straddling the worlds of photojournalism and conceptual photography, all the while figuratively taking my ‘office/studio’ with me to London, New York, Cape Town, Phuket, Hong Kong, Paris, Johannesburg, Saigon and Penang. Cities I have, or do call ‘home’.
Yes I’ve been consistently inconsistent in all aspects of my personal and professional life with regards to the conventional approach to either, so I can only hope the ‘out of synch’ effect has somehow had an affect on my photography, which in turn may have an effect on you the viewer.
The presentations herewith constitute my best work to date! The personal categories reflect my interests and practice in a variety of photographic genres. Likewise the commissioned work is all relative to the times and brief. Ultimately I have attempted to curate the collections to appeal to as broader audience as possible.
Richard Mark Dobson
Hong Kong
July 2020
