PHOTOGRAPHY

When I enrolled as a photography student at Ealing College of Art in 1953 I learned my craft with large format mahogany cameras using glass plates. Photography was then considered expensive and difficult and best left to professionals. The idea that in future anyone with a portable phone and no specialist knowledge would be able to shoot not only photographs but also video with sound and instantaneously send the results to anyone in world, would have seemed pure fantasy. Yet here we are 54 years later and the miracle is commonplace. Now everybody is a photographer and we are in danger of being buried under a blizzard of visual ephemera like the shoals of plastic contaminating our seas. Farewell photography...