Considering my own practice as a photographer, the concept of context is troubling, has been for some time, and is my primary motive for this Masters course. Since reconnecting with photography in 2008, my work has been framed almost exclusively by social media. First, from 2008 until around 2011, on Flickr, thereafter Facebook and additionally, from 2017, Instagram.

Troubling, as I have become increasingly aware of how this context has shaped and is shaping my practice and my emotional engagement with it. To no small extent, when I’m out with my camera, I’m rehearsing a role that will ultimately be performed digitally on social media. I’m thinking which shot will get the most likes. I’m thinking whether those likes will come from my individual style – my obsession with surreal shadows – or from conforming to contemporary picturesques such as sunset or edgeland exoticism. I want to move beyond this, to discover new contexts. I believe I have more to ‘say’ with my work, that the single-shot, scrolling brevity of social media is inadequate as a means of interrogating ideas about place and landscape, and that there are conversations about art, the record and land that I wish to join. Photography, like film, like literature, is performed somewhere and for somebody, and the place and audience set the terms of this performance. I want to shake up my ‘channel of consumption’ completely.