Out of Darkness Cometh Light - a 21st century photographer's odyssey

Barrie, a forensic psychologist, only took up digital photography earnestly as he approached retirement in the early years of the 21st Century. His thinking was to be able to go on learning and creating when inevitably the time came to put on the ‘back-burner’ the professional skills that had absorbed so much of his energy, sense of purpose and time for nigh on four decades.

In this presentation he recounts and illustrates the steps, challenges, victories and disappointments of what he describes as his photographic odyssey - a never-ending voyage of exploration he has travelled since the early noughties. A voyage that has led him joyously through several of the accepted genre of photography, but, in the last decade, has drawn him increasingly towards wanting to reveal the complexity, beauty, resilience and fragility of the natural world around us, and to share the experience with as many people as possible, preferably face to face rather than digitally on screen. 

So Out of Darkness Cometh Light is not primarily a ‘how to’ presentation. As much, if not more of the evening will focus on why he takes photographs than how. It offers an evening of questioning about what, where and why any of us takes photographs at all – hopefully with loads of input from the audience. The evening will end with Barrie, now almost a quarter of a century into his 21st Century Odyssey, reflecting on what it is that continues to fuel this passion for taking photographs and sharing and exhibiting the results. And perhaps with an attempt to make sense  of what 21st Century photography is becoming in a world increasingly enabled, or at least influenced,  by  the products of AI.