In the autumn of 2023, about a month after arriving in London, a message on a university society network took me to a pub down the street for a photographers’ meetup. Everyone there had one thing in common: either a camera hanging from their neck, or a bag they could pull one out of at any moment. I turned up a little late, but once I pushed the door open there was no mistaking where to go. The table covered in cameras was clearly mine.
What stayed with me from that evening was a conversation with a student with a heavy French accent, about the subjects and projects I had shot over the years. Somewhere in the middle of it he said, quite bluntly: “Show me the photo!”
I froze for a second. How was I supposed to show him? Scroll through my phone? Open Instagram? A cloud album? In the end I took the easiest way out and we swapped Instagram handles. But I knew it was not the right way to share work.
The truth is, this problem had come up much earlier. Back in my university days I met a Canadian at a 3D print cafe near campus, and he taught me something: when you introduce yourself, you want one direct, effective object, a name card or something like it, that lets the other person grasp your background at a glance. The details can wait for the second or third round of conversation.
So how do you properly present and organise your own work? Instagram is a fine social platform, but it is built for socialising and marketing, some distance from the sorting and curating I had in mind. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed I would need to find a quiet stretch of time, build a personal site, and slowly type the content into it.
Then life got busy. Web design is a big undertaking, and while off-the-shelf templates can do something similar, that brings back the Instagram problem. How a story gets told is the part I care about. On top of that, editing and organising photos takes real time. So the idea sank quietly out of sight again.
Until one day I found that AI tools could help me put a site together, and tried building an online photography portfolio I could actually maintain myself. The first version came out surprisingly right. That gave me some momentum, and I started digging photo files off my drives to select and sort, remembering the stories behind them and what I had been thinking when I pressed the shutter. A bit like pulling out old bottles one by one, taking a few sips, then inviting others to taste. It turns out to be a rather enjoyable pastime.
For now the plan is to take twenty years of surviving files and slowly compile them into memory albums, arranged by the cities, places and stories I passed through. Some may be distilled further into themed exhibitions. Others are film results from old cameras in the dry cabinet, which will gradually become collections of their own. And then some writing: travel notes, thoughts on a particular lens, the kind of thing worth keeping in prose.
This is a public site, but my hope for it is that it simply sits there quietly. It does not need to push a notification at the world every time something small changes. A friend might think of it out of nowhere, drop by, and see what has been put together. As the saying goes, good wine fears no dark alley. Or it is simply a tool for when we meet in person: I type the address into a browser and tell a few small stories on the spot.
That is what set this site in motion. Thank you for visiting, and my deeper thanks go to the travel companion who walked all these places with me.