Salt

One of the earliest photographs in my book Outside, published in 2017, is a black and white seascape created in West Cork in 1992. This series, Salt, brings me back to that same stretch of coastline – pictures made over the summer of 2016 on cliffs no more than a stone’s throw from where that first photograph was created. A small distance to have travelled in twenty-five years, yet in many ways a lifetime.

Over those years I have travelled extensively, often driven by the desire to create new work – to immerse myself in unfamiliar places and return with images that feel meaningful and resolved. There is always a sense of anticipation in that process, and the quiet hope of discovering something exceptional.

Yet more recently I have found myself drawn back, time and again, to the landscape closest to home. The landscape and coastline of West Cork. Working within a few miles of where I live, along the south-west Atlantic coast of Ireland, I have come to realise that the work that resonates most deeply – both creatively and personally – has always been here. There is a familiarity, a connection, and a sense of ease that I find nowhere else.

Perhaps that is simply part of the journey. A gradual return to what is in our blood – to what has always been there: constant, elemental, and quietly enduring.