Looking through glass

I spent some time in Paris in early 2010. It was winter. Everything had a greyness to it. After a while, i stopped shooting in colour, and instead switched to black and white. I found the experience of living in Paris to be that of the stranger. I was always looking at things through a lens, looking at the reflections in the window of an underground train, wandering through glass museums or watching the snow leopard at the zoo. It is only in hindsight that i can now recognise how much of an onlooker i was. I could go days without speaking a word. There is a certain sense of blankness that exists with the experience of looking and an aching impossibility when one perceives that the world around them is often captured rather than lived. I sometimes think of abandoning photography all together, yet i am quite certain that i never will. Both the difficulty and joy of photography is that while i can never truly remember or forget, a photograph presents an other place, one that i can return to again and again. It places me somewhere in between looking, seeing and creating, which is one of photography's most powerful charms, and a reminder of why i continue to paint.