I love photography. It is my passion from as far as I can remember.  My first experiences with a camera was with Lego blocks. I tried to build a Zeiss Contarex, very unsuccessfully  I have to admit, but at least I tried. Even then I can remember admiring the steel Zeiss lenses. OMG they were pieces of art. I could feel light vanishing in the front and never coming out like a black hole. My mother’s Zeiss lenses sucked the light out of your eyes if you did not wrench it in front of a camera. I wished I could build them with my colorful blocks, but that was never to happen, I had to copy second best the body. When the Lego thrill passed I  grabbed an empty Kodak Instamatic in a forgotten drawer and imagined taking photo’s of various dubious objects around me.  

It was the clicking of the shutter that made me and the camera one. That sound was so final. It made a memory fall down through all my synapses that were available from head to toe in a split second and drenched myself in dopamine and serotonin. Shutter clicking was like a fugue of pleasure waves. Like your first 100 orgasms, just over and over and over and over whenever you want without losing the feeling.

As I grew older dopamine and serotonin replenishment was the task of girls, and not photography, until I started studying and the University of Stellenbosch.  There I found my love again and often travelled with art students on their afternoon homework sessions (tuts) seeking inspiration and material to satisfy the lecturer’s or teacher’s lack of excitement in his work.

Strangely enough, instead of studying agriculture, I found myself spread over the half-exposed pseudo artwork at university. Wishing I was them and they were me.

Even after I graduated I found myself again in the dark rooms with dinosaurs stretching to the ceiling and doing test strips of the most mundane images. The fact that I was doing it, just boosted my serotonin and if someone asked if I could stay there the night and ‘work’ it would have felt like a promotion.

Anyway, I’m here now. Multiple decades have passed and I have the freedom and hopefully the insight to express what I love very deeply.