Becca's Polaroids

These two pictures were taken by Becca Chapman, she is an art student, like my son Jim (who is hiding behind his cat), though they are at different universities, they were at school together. Becca, like many of my friends and family, is very visually aware, and pictures of whatever sort are important to her, she loves Polaroid and was delighted to find that it was not going to disappear after all.

Photography can be so many things, a record, a memory, an aspiration. It can be art and or craft, it can be exciting or calming but it nearly always means something to someone. Having a physical entity, a print makes that meaning so much more enduring.

I have looked afresh at my attitude towards photography, it had become a part of 'work' for me, a part of the life I led but not something I really felt passionate about. Developing this business has made me look at it with different eyes though. Photographs exist as a part of our cultural history, a record of what makes us what we are. Not only in the sense that they record those events in our lives when traditionally the cameras come out but - to me at least as importantly - they are a record of what stimulates us visually and a snapshot of the way we interpret our surroundings.

Personally I love movement in images, a blurring that cannot be seen with the eye but is captured so excitingly with a camera and I love grain, I guess it brings me back to my favorite theme, they both have a really 'photographic' look to them.

Becca's Polaroids are equally 'photographic', moments seen and captured, recorded in a way that is not reality but is an extraordinarily pleasing representation of it.