I grew up mostly in Durban, South Africa and began dabbling with cameras in my late teenage years, usually on family trips (in fact, 'Old Timers,' taken in North Wales in the mid-90s, is the earliest effort to make into these galleries). At the turn of the new millennium, I left South Africa for a somewhat meandering route through teaching and odd jobs in Changhua, Yongin and Bratislava, followed by periods of study in Pune and Cambridge; in retrospect all were waypoints elsewhere.  Eventually, the road led back to the never-empty city of Johannesburg, where I now live and work as academic, stuck, for better or worse, like a barnacle upon the rock of knowledge. Here, my day job is as an historian of empires, mostly in their twilight. My research moves through southern Africa, the Indian Ocean, port cities, archives and the lives of people caught in motion between places. Whenever I can, though, I walk with a camera. 

Both my written and visual interests take in streets, architecture, waterfronts and coastlines of various kinds.  Photography sits alongside my archival work as a parallel way of thinking: if writing explores how people move across places, photography lets me explore how places move across people.  I’m drawn most to the fleeting arrangements of people and things that cities, towns and villages generate, usually without much warning: odd juxtapositions, eccentric splashes of colour, quirks of geometry, the shadows cast by ruins ancient and modern. 

The galleries here gather photographs reaching back to now dust-speckled prints from the early 2000s - now freshened up with a lick of digital paint - and continue into the present. Driftwork is the word I've borrowed to give to a habit of attentive wandering that developed over the years, as I explain in more depth here.  The photographs, many imperfect, are records of moments that caught my eye before either they or I vanished again.

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