A Short and Selective History...
The earliest coherent memories I have are of music associated with a field of colour. My father had a guitar and he met my mother at art school where they were learning to paint. I studied music at the Royal Conservatory, but I learned how to play on the street. It was the real education: playing real live music in front of real live people. My grandmother gave me my first camera - a Kodak Brownie and my mother followed with a series of Instamatics and the family kicked for reams of 126 cartridges. Before I left home, my father gave me a Pentax with a fast fifty. The timing was right. Up until then, what I was only able to do with music in a group, I discovered a way of doing by myself: visually examining and decoding, making sense of the world through sensual exploration. Playing, shooting, it's an interesting combination of the visceral and meditative. There is a big overlap between the field of colour and the music all around us. I spent the next thirty years off and on the road.When I turned thirty I found myself diverted by aeroplanes -- a larger expression of the urge for freedom in space. Eventually I wrangled an Airline Transport Pilot License and wound up flying corporate and charter from the Beaufort Sea to the Gulf of Mexico . I managed to keep working as a musician through all of it. I’m not a morning person - except if the light is good - or much of a suit-and-tie guy, so when I got a gig fighting forest fires with an aeroplane, I jumped. It’s the only flying I do now - a few months every summer, just enough to keep my hand in. The view is incredible. I bring my camera - always.
My father, Ian Adams, a writer and photographer, taught me about processing film and traditional wet printing. More importantly he also taught me to question the subject of the lens, to seek the essence, a centre, an over-arching characteristic or premise that has the power to provoke question in and of ourselves. I studied colour photography with Jay Maisel. If you ever get the chance to spend time with that man, do it. It will change your life. My stepfather, another painter, taught me that it is not about being a better visual artist, but about looking more carefully. There is an endless landscape, internal and external, yet to be explored, decoded and questioned with the camera. I make music, fly aeroplanes and take photographs because it brings me great pleasure.
To the extent that any of these images affect you is the measure of my success in translating things that have struck me as profound.
