It has been a long time since we last spoke. I have been watching with interest through your blog and website the journey you have been and are still on; marvelling at the beauty of your images and seeing through your words how much of your soul you put into your photography.

This is the first time I have responded to your blog and I wonder at that. I often hold myself back through fear that I don’t have the right words to say. But this latest blog and image has inspired me to write.

The words on the wall have articulated something that I have been wrestling with for some time. I don’t consider myself religious and do not “belong” to any religious group, but I do consider myself as a spiritual being. I believe that hell only exists in our minds and to recognise that and consciously move ourself to a place where it no longer has a hold is the real spiritual journey. We have all been to hell at some time in our lives even if we don’t realise it.

One of the few places I have rest from my mind is when I am looking through the viewfinder of my camera. So in that sense, for me photography, particularly landscape photography, is often an experience of the spiritual.

Mannequins cannot speak. I suspect it is what you have to say to them that is the piece you are wrestling with.

“From time to time I think about those people who, having found the photographic path that works for them, and fascinated by it, compelled to follow it, do so happily for the rest of their careers”

Those photographers, or anything for that matter, who don’t fit into the above group you mention, are more likely to be not accepting, rather than not finding, who they are or what works for them. Instead perhaps following the misguided old belief that the grass is always greener in another paddock, or that what someone else does is more attractive popular fashionable or contemporary than what they do. Sometimes attributing to fatal outcomes. The British photographer Bob Carlos Clark, very famous for his fetishistic fashion photographs (he committed suicide) was never happy to just be famous among his peers, he wanted so badly to also be famous in the art world, a world that pretty much rejected or ignored him. To know how much this contributed to his suicide is impossible to understand, but from what I have read it was perhaps considerable.

We are who we are, accepting that is a signpost for the restless soul.

You may be on a journey of discovery emotionally and spiritually, and to some degree physically, but when you look at your work do you think photographically as well, I don’t! It is not subject matter that defines who you are as a photographer, what difference really is there between a fragile environment like the Maniototo sky and a seemingly vast expanse of swimming pool water? Or for that matter the suggested emotional fragility of naked mannequins.

What defines you as a photographer and person, is your sense of caring for place and person! That is apparent to me in both what you say and do. Your in the village mate, fortunately, in this respect anyway, we live in a Global one!