Cabinets of Curiosities

Natural History

Through studying Photography in college I began pursuing a very specific style of Analogue photography. Due to the lighting setups involved and the kind of hairy, miserable kind of guys that populate the bands I like, this was mostly explored as live gig photography. Some examples of this are viewable over at my website (see below). Unfortunately when I achieved what I felt was a level of [ACCURACY?] with this particular technique of image making, I came to realise that no one quite liked it as much as I did so my bulky SLR was retired to the back of the wardrobe where it still sits, hoping one day to be shown the light of day and made use of again. 

At some point much later, I acquired a camera phone and began taking quick snaps of elements I found in my surroundings, for reference, amusement or my own perverted idea of the 'decisive moment' that would likely make Bresson spit on me. Only in recent times has this begun to develop back into actual image making again, largely due to the kind of mobile applications that work to hide the largely inadequate quality of camera phones.  

I don't see the images portrayed here as art by any means. I believe anyone with the right combination of filters, pointing a smartphone at the same object could acquire pretty much the same effect, but the reason I have decided to share them is through that perverted sense of the decisive moment I mentioned. These are fragments of the world that stuck out at me. That caught my interest. Moments of strange, unnoticed beauty I found looking back at me. 
 

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Illustrations & Design
 

www.Michael-Cowell.com : : go here.