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| Martin Sharman | ||
| I was born close to where the Piltdown Man was discovered, though slightly after this more momentous event. This coincidence has had a negligible impact on my photographic life. By the time I was 4 months old I was living in a mud hut in the bush in Northern Rhodesia. My mother recorded bits of that adventure with her Box Brownie, which today sits on a shelf above my more active camera equipment. Having started out in life so well, everything went downhill from there, and at one moment in my confusing upbringing I became the only kid in the history of the world to travel from the UK to the colonies to go to boarding school. My mother failed to record that on film, which probably explains a lot more about me than the Piltdown Man does. She kept on taking photos when we moved to Kenya, then Uganda, then Tanganyika, and then back to Kenya. I always liked her photos, but could never quite get up the courage to take my own. Until, that is, I escaped the maternal influence and went to university in Scotland, where the abrupt and beautiful changes in light, coupled with the abrupt and beautiful landscape and architecture, inspired me to begin taking black-and-white shots with a cheap second-hand camera. And developing my own negatives and printing my own shots, which, all things considered, was a mistake. All that made me realise that I’m not really a photographer, but I’d like to be. After Scotland, I moved around a bit. When I lived in the States, the light was like liquid inspiration. When I moved to Brussels, the giant softbox of a sky did nothing for my confidence. If I could be anyone in the world, I’d be a famous and wealthy (not necessarily in that order) portrait photographer. Unhappily for me, I’m not sufficiently enterprising to find enough willing victims, or good enough to get rich and famous even if the victims were lining up outside. Luckily for me, I love space and light, and living things and wild places. This means that in my bouts of resting between taking portraits, I seek out places to go on holiday where I suspect that the light is magnificent and I’ll find a rich seam of things to photograph. |
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