I photograph what stays still long enough to be seen.

That sounds simple. In practice it is not. Presence is not stillness. A subject can be physically motionless and emotionally absent. What I look for is the other thing — the moment when an animal stops performing and simply exists, when a person stops being aware of being watched, when the space between two beings becomes legible.

I work in black and white because I find that removing colour removes a layer of explanation. The image stops directing attention and starts asking for it. Tonal form becomes the language. Shadow and light become the structure. I am drawn to photographs that feel discovered rather than made — images where the composition feels like a consequence of paying attention rather than an exercise of technical control.

Portraiture, for me, is not about documentation. I am not primarily interested in recording who someone is. I am interested in the quality of presence they carry, and whether that quality can be held in a still image. An animal at rest carries that same quality of presence.

The human-animal bond is one of the specific territories I return to. Not because it is sentimental — I am not interested in sentimentality — but because the relationship between a person and an animal produces a particular quality of mutual attention. It is something you catch at the edge of the frame, in the way someone holds their hands, in the posture of an animal at rest beside a person. It is relational rather than dramatic.

I print the work. A photograph on a screen is incomplete. The tonal depth of a monochrome image — its real relationship between black and light and grey — only becomes fully present in a physical print, on paper that absorbs the image and gives it weight. The work is designed for rooms, not for feeds.