Barnsley, February 2009 I'd idly taken photos with my mobile for a couple of years, mostly to document things which made me laugh. Despite being capable and confident with moving image I was hesitant about still photography. As with drawing, it seemed almost impudent to ask someone to look at a single image with no extra bells or whistles. I was struck at about this time by a passage by Patrick Maynard (The Engine of Visualisation, Chapter 2) where he talks of photography as a species of surface marking (and therefore somewhat akin to drawing - but I'm massively oversimplifying his magnificently nuanced and book length argument). I also became keenly interested in the strand of lo-fi, lo-res photography associated with early conceptualism, particularly Ed Ruscha, Douglas Huebler and John Baldessari. The fact that I found Ruscha's 26 Gas Stations not only interesting but astonishingly beautiful and moving made me think hard about how the banal, the insignificant, the light, the quickly or cheaply made, the daily, the fragmentary and the amusing could encompass profundity just as effectively as the lavishly conceived and planned, expensively made and grandiose. Since 2006 I'd been blogging my films. I'd found this 21st Century kind of diary a perfect vehicle to both unify a sequence and respect the fragmentary nature of each component. I decided to start posting my photographic images to Flickr - not the, clean, hand-coded environment of my movie blog but an off the shelf, Web 2.0, free for all, where photos of people's cats and kids and holidays jostle against photo gear obsessives, bird-watchers, train-spotters and a great messy pile of putative art, plus, most interestingly of all, people who are clearly making art but would probably deny it. It's not a place for those who want to hang on to their purity too tightly.