Alex Webb
I take complex photographs because I experience the world — particularly more and more as I get older — as a very complicated and ultimately inexplicable place. My experiences in the world, my travels as a photographer, lead me to believe that there are no simple solutions, no easy answers, just a lot of difficult and perhaps unanswerable questions.
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Like most everyone over 50 you started out shooting black-and-white. Was there a specific time when you started to understand the way color could work for you in your photos? Other than the obvious, how was it different than making black-and-white photos? Why haven’t you gone back to black-and-white?
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Steven Mayes
I’m an architectural photographer. That is the core of my business and my passion. The end product varies depending on your requirements as a client: a portfolio of digital files, a single multi-image panorama, a framed print. What you are investing in doesn’t. My photography is about capturing that sense of I formed Steve Mayes Photography in 2002, a couple of years after moving to the North East from where I grew up in the Midlands. My interest in photographing places had been developing slowly, in the background, from trips around Europe and North America. When I moved to Newcastle the iconic architecture that I found myself surrounded by, old and new, seemed to be the final spark that turned photography into a real passion.
It is commonplace nowadays that photography is only ever seen on a screen – a sign of the times and the ever-evolving technology around us. It is also not necessarily a bad thing, depending on your viewpoint. One side effect in my opinion is that the power to impress with physical prints has increased.My beginnings as a photographer were based around the sale of cityscape and landscape prints, and this continues to be an important part of what I do.