One of those giants is American photographer, Irving Penn (1917 - 2009).

Penn was an absolute master of the medium, not only with the camera but also in the darkroom. 

His life’s work left the art world with a wide ranging and hugely influential portfolio. Still life, fashion, portraiture, drawings and paintings.

Penn’s beautiful, graphic and sometimes confronting still life images are a huge inspiration for me. 

I love the tension, composition, colour and use of light in his pictures, not to mention the masterful technical craft that went into his darkroom experiments. I’ve always kept his work and his way of seeing things in the back of my mind. His work has taught me to love reality - that things can be a little broken or bruised as long as they are treated with the utmost attention. Seen well they can be beautiful in a very compelling and emotional way.

When my partner’s sister arrived with a bunch of roses for their mother’s 85th birthday in May, I decided that the flowers would be dried and photographed to mark the time. Like a lot of my recent still life work, they ended up on the light table and I allowed the light from the studio’s south facing windows to slide over the edges. 

These are classic Penn. I’m not going to pretend otherwise - but this is now and I’m responding in my own way to how beautiful life is, the marking of time, the gesture, the love and the decay. 

So stand on the shoulders of giants - remix, repeat, emulate and learn - just don’t forget to say their name.