The White Rabbit
The White Rabbit: A New Home for Art Prints
This week sees the launch of something rather different for me, and something that has been quietly developing in the background for some time.
It is called The White Rabbit and it is a new online home for my personal photographic art prints, created from a collection of images that have, until now, largely remained unseen.
For many years, my professional photography has been driven by commissions for major brands, agencies and organisations. Much of that work is focused on commercial photography, whether that means photographing cars, aircraft, trucks, machinery or people, and the images are created with a very specific purpose in mind. They need to communicate a brand, sell a product, tell a story or provide a client with imagery that can be used across their marketing. But alongside that professional work there has always been another side to my photography. It is the photography I create simply because I find something interesting.
Sometimes that means travelling somewhere specifically to photograph a landscape or an environment. Sometimes it means experimenting with light, perspective and technique., and occasionally it means photographing something that is almost completely removed from the commercial work I am known for.
The White Rabbit Print Store has been created to give those photographs somewhere to live.
Photography Beyond the Commission
One of the things I have always enjoyed about photography is that there really are no rules about what makes something worth photographing.A photograph does not necessarily need to have a client behind it, a marketing campaign attached to it or a commercial purpose. Sometimes an image simply needs to make you stop and look.
Over the years I have accumulated a considerable archive of photographs that were created outside of commissioned work. Some were part of personal projects, while others were experiments that were never intended to become anything more than an interesting photographic exercise.
One example is a body of work from Darwin, a remote and fascinating ghost town in California, USA. Photographing places like this is very different from working on a commercial shoot. There is no client brief telling me what needs to be photographed or how the final images should look. Instead, it becomes about observation, atmosphere and finding something within the environment that catches my attention. There is also a growing collection of personal landscape photography, together with images that explore much more unusual subjects.
And this is where The White Rabbit becomes particularly interesting.
Going Down the Rabbit Hole
The name is deliberately playful. The White Rabbit is about following an idea and seeing where it leads. One photograph leads to another, one technique creates another experiment, and suddenly you find yourself somewhere you never expected to be. That philosophy is reflected in some of the more unusual images within the collection.
Among the work are a series of images created using an X-ray style approach to reveal everyday objects in a completely different way. One of the subjects is something as familiar and nostalgic as a 1980s music mixtape. It is an object that many of us will instantly recognise but photographed in this way it becomes something almost alien.
There are also images of marine animals and flowers, where form, structure and detail become the subject rather than simply the object itself.
Interestingly, the flower photography has its roots in something much more ordinary. Around four years ago I developed a newfound love of gardening. As the garden developed, so did my interest in photographing the things growing within it. Flowers became another photographic subject, providing an opportunity to explore shape, texture, colour, translucency and light. It is a good example of how photography can evolve in unexpected directions.
From Personal Photography to Art Prints
The decision to turn these photographs into photographic art prints was not something I took lightly. There is a big difference between creating an image for yourself and producing something that you are happy to see hanging on somebody else's wall.
The White Rabbit is intended to bridge that gap.
The collection is now available online, with selected photographs produced as art prints across a range of different formats and materials. The intention is not to create a huge catalogue simply for the sake of having one. Instead, I want The White Rabbit to remain a collection of photography that I genuinely enjoy and that I would be happy to have in my own home.
The quality of the finished print is also hugely important. Photography is, after all, a visual medium, and the physical reproduction of an image should do justice to the original photograph. The White Rabbit therefore offers a selection of professional print and display options designed to bring the photographs away from the screen and into the real world.
You can explore the collection and the available photographic art prints through The White Rabbit online store, where the photographs are available across different print formats and products.
A Different Side of My Photography
Perhaps the most exciting part of launching The White Rabbit is that it represents a different side of my photography.
My commercial work has always required precision, planning and an understanding of exactly what an image needs to achieve. Personal photography is different. It allows me to experiment, to make mistakes, to follow an idea simply because it interests me and, occasionally, to photograph something just because I like the way it looks.
After spending so many years creating photography for other people, there is something incredibly satisfying about creating images without a brief.
The White Rabbit gives those images a new purpose.
Some have been sitting unseen within my archive for 20 years. Others are more recent experiments that have developed naturally from my interests outside professional photography. Together, they represent a much broader picture of what photography means to me. And that is really what The White Rabbit is about.
It is not intended to replace the commercial photography I do. It is something completely separate. It is a place for the photographs that exist simply because I wanted to make them.
There will undoubtedly be more to come. More landscapes, more experiments, more unusual subjects and, almost certainly, more photographs that I have no idea will become part of the collection yet.
That is the fun of following the White Rabbit.
You never quite know where it is going to take you.
Explore The White Rabbit and discover the collection of photographic art prints online:
The White Rabbit Art on Canvas, Poster, and More
Find out more about the print materials and quality available:
Materials of the highest quality from Art Heroes