Welcome to Duncan’s Military Photography, Visual Storytelling and Recording History.
My aim is to capture and preserve moments of significance during activities which may be defining or worth remembering in future, be it sporting events, significant changes in social or company history as well as changes in rural or urban landscapes.
In a digital age most pictorial documents are captured and stored on microchips of mobile phones, harddrives and computers. They will all fail one day as SD cards, hard drives, CD-Rs and other digital storage media may not be able to be read. Computing advances at a breakneck speed and tragedy will strike when we are not able to recover our memories.
I concentrate on creating tangible records of events on paper prints and books. It may be old fashioned but viewing doesn’t require electricity and some form of display equipment. Images hanging on walls, stacked in a shoe box or presented in a book can be viewed by anybody without requiring a computer. Additionally the significance of individual impressions are not overlooked by a hurried scroll through a gallery online. Cloud services are as secure as the financial status of the tech giants. If they go bankrupt their digital storage will most certainly be at risk, too.
The importance of portraits:
Many are camera shy. Often we are all too conscious of our appearance and don’t really like to have these captured for prosperity…or even don’t like the look of ourselves. But we are all a product of nature and are not able to choose our ‘perfect body’. However, we are all getting older. That is a fact. Nobody is exempt. Another fact: we will never…ever…look as young and as good as we do now. It may be worth preserving our current selves for future generations to come; or be it only to remember when we are old, to show how good looking we were in the old days. And let’s be honest, we all loved looking at images of our parents or grandparents when they were young. We laughed about the fashion, their hair, admired their achievements and were glad such family images survived the time.