What was it that attracted you to the art of photography? Can you give us a brief story of your background? How often do you travel?

In 2011 I quit my job in the UK, and decided to go travelling around the world instead. I didn’t have savings, so I took jobs along the way – for example, I did a lot freelance writing work for firms in the UK and the US, while I backpacked across Europe, through Russia, and down the coast of East Asia. Then that lifestyle sort of stuck, and while I’m based in Bulgaria a lot of time, I still travel very frequently – in 2019, for example, before the pandemic, I visited something like 24 countries.

Before I began travelling, I hadn’t really thought much about photography. When I started taking pictures, it was mostly for myself – I wanted to preserve my memories, and more importantly, the feelings that I had experienced in different places. So I think the style of photography I developed plays into the idea of phenomenonlgy as a result. I have a particular interest for architecture and other manmade objects such as monuments, but I often like to photograph these in unusual or surprising contexts, or with a focus on details that tell more of a story connected to the place. I look for things that add extra layers of meaning – like new growth, or decay, or human visitors in alien-looking landscapes.

One of my favourite feelings is that of finding something extraordinary that isn’t marked on the map – a hidden bunker beneath an old factory, an overgrown monument somewhere deep in the forest, that sort of thing. I feel this real child-like excitement about finding something unexpected, and I think a lot of my photographs are trying to capture that feeling of wonder or surprise, and share it with others.

Your work includes many photographic landscapes. How important is the role of nature in your photography and why? How important are people?

Nature has always been very important to the kind of images I produce – but it’s rarely the focus. Rather, I think it provides a contrast. Fragile human structures set against dramatic, timeless mountains… I find that sort of juxtaposition very interesting, and in cases where I am photographing abandoned, derelict or disused sites, nature can balance this by bringing new life into the picture. I’m interested in the idea of how fragile even our greatest constructions appear, when contrasted with the timeless and infinite power of nature.

People are generally less interesting to me, as a photographic subject. I don’t think I’ve ever taken an “artistic” photo of someone. Usually, if I take a portrait photo it’s more for documentary purposes. Most of the time if I do feature people in a photograph, it will be in order to give a sense of scale to other objects… or to show how a place is being used. It’s quite rare for me to focus on the person themselves.

Do you consider yourself more a photographer or a writer?

I consider myself as a writer first – because I feel better able to express myself in writing, and it’s something I’ve been doing for a lot longer than I have been creating images. But in a way I think they’re both coming from the same place. In fact, I don’t particularly enjoy the actual act of writing – it’s hard work! But I do enjoy sharing ideas, and places, or sometimes simply trying to capture and convey the particular feeling or emotion of being in a certain place or situation. And so really, writing and photography are both tools that I use – sometimes at the same time – in the pursuit of one single idea.

Since you have photographed so much of Ukraine in the past, what memories do the images of war bring back to you?

Before the pandemic began, I was spending between six weeks and three months in Ukraine every year. I have a lot of good friends there, who I’ve been in regular contact with since the war began. I have found the past few months incredibly difficult, and it fills me with horror to see new war photographs taken in places that I have a personal connection to.

Watching the recent conflict unfold at Chernobyl has been a particularly strange and upsetting experience, as it’s a place I know very well now. I wrote a book about Chernobyl, which released in 2020 – and at that time, I thought I was writing about current events, a kind of contemporary ethnography of the Zone. But now everything there has completely changed. I feel like my book switched genre, from Current events to History, almost overnight.

As I watch the news now, I think a lot about the people I’ve met and spent time with in Ukraine. For example, one friend, a guide who leads illegal ‘stalker’ tours through the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, told me that he first became interested in Chernobyl after playing the Ukrainian-made Stalker videogames which are set there. After playing those games, creeping through a virtual version of the Chernobyl Zone with a rifle, he decided he wanted to go and see the real Zone for himself. And now – he has joined the territorial defence, and so he’s actually patrolling the real Chernobyl Zone with a rifle. Life imitating art imitating life. I find the whole situation so tragic and surreal.

If I asked you to name a book, a poem or a song that has inspired your work, which one comes to mind?

One theme that I think comes through in a lot of my writing and photography is hubris: vast buildings left unfinished in wild landscapes, or extravagant monuments crumbling as ruins after their creators fell from power. And in that sense, I often think back to the poem Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley, which I first read at a very young age, and which had a poweful effect on me. The poem describes a pharaoh’s towering monument, built as a symbol of vast imperial power, but left now in ruins long after that empire had perished and disappeared:

“And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

In fact, I think The Lord of the Rings had a strong effect on me too. I grew up in rural England, the kind of place which Tolkein based the Shire on. The books have quite a sweet and idealistic philosophy on travel, with this idea that there is goodness and wonder to be found everywhere, and that being pure of heart is more important than being rich or powerful. I was 12 when I first read those books, and they made a big impression on me! This passage, for example, has always stuck with me:

“Still round the corner there may wait a new road or a secret gate, and though I oft have passed them by, a day will come at last when I shall take the hidden paths that run west of the moon, east of the sun.”

Of all the places you host on Ex-Utopia, which one brings up the spookiest memories?

I find this a difficult question to answer… even though I have visited a lot of places which might seem “spooky” to other people. For example, I’m fascinated by ghost stories and on numerous occasions I have visited – or even spent the night in – allegedly haunted houses or hotels. But I’m not particularly superstitious, and while I’ll always keep an open mind, I haven’t yet seen anything that makes me believe in ghosts. As a result, I don’t tend to get affected by such places at all.

However, there is one place I often think about, which did have a very strong effect on me. It was a former memorial site on a mountainside in Bosnia & Herzegovina, built by the Yugoslav state but then later abandoned and heavily damaged during the Bosnian War in the 1990s. I have visited quite a few Yugoslav memorials, some of them commemorating the places where truly awful events had occurred. In comparison, this particular site was in some ways more positive as it was built in the place not of a massace, but of a partisan hospital that operated in WWII. But there was just such an incredible sadness about this particular place, that made it very hard for me to visit.

It was lost deep in a forest, and seemed as though it hadn’t been visited in years. The trees were so overgrown that the sun hardly touched it, and the decorative pond had become choked with weeds and slime. Everywhere we found dead frogs and birds, dozens of them, as if the water itself had turned bad and poisoned the wildlife. In this context, the abstract architecture of the memorial, designed to be progressive and utopian, took on very sinister qualities and it made for an extremely emotional visit. I don’t think I’d ever want to go back there.

Do you have a preference for cameras? Do you use your mobile phone to take photos?

At the moment I’m using a Canon 6D Mark II – which is quite a heavy, chunky DSLR – with a 24-105mm zoom lens. My previous camera was a similar build too. My photography trips can often be quite physically active – involving climbing, crawling or even running! – so I like a camera that feels solid, dependable, and like it can survive the odd knock or bump. And in that sense, my Canon feels like a tank.

Though having said that, I find it honestly incredible how good mobile phone cameras are getting these days. I have an iPhone, and sometimes I’ll just use that for daytime photography – the results are perfectly good enough for online use. Though for night photography, underground photography, or anything I might one day want to blow up, print, or put in a book, I’ll still take the larger camera.

In this digital age, do you think the online photography community is different from the analogue photography community?

I couldn’t tell you! I began taking photography seriously only around a decade ago – and I went straight into using digital cameras. So my work is very much a product of the digital age, and I’ve had no experience with either analogue photography, or the analogue photography community.

If you were given the power to rid this planet of something, what would you choose and why?

Cruelty. While it’s very easy, and tempting, to simply say I would rid the planet of war, I don’t know if “world peace” in itself is necessarily a desirable thing. Every imperial dictator in history has wanted world peace, in the sense that they want ultimate power without resistance. Meanwhile, some conflicts in history have been just – or even, arguably, necessary. But the human capacity for cruelty frightens me, and I think that it’s something that we, as a species, ought to have evolved beyond by now.

Which famous person would you like to photograph?

I don’t think I would really want to photograph anyone famous. If I’m photographing a human, a proper portrait photo, it’s most likely a little-known person who has an extraordinary story that I want to bring more attention to. If someone is already famous though, then I’m not sure what benefit there could be for me to take yet another photograph of them. However – if a famous person would be happy to stand next to a 50-metre-tall monument for me, in order to illustrate the size of the architecture, then in that case they would be welcome to be in my shot.

You prefer colour photography, but have you ever experimented with b/w?

I have tried shooting in black and white before, but I never found it a particularly satisfying way to work, and I don’t think I’ve ever made those photographs public. It’s for a similar reason that I’m not particularly attracted to drone photography. I prefer to capture the world as I see it through my own eyes. And while I’ve often been very impressed with the work I’ve seen other photographers do in black and white, or with aerial photography, I nevertheless find it an unnatural perspective and so I don’t find I can personally express myself that way. In contrast, I feel my own photography is perhaps better described as a personal and emotional documentary project, in which colour is extremely important for establishing mood and atmosphere.