Statement
Life moves fast and you need to slow down to appreciate everything around you. When you do, even a lonely city pigeon can become a star in its own adventure.
Aaron Eames was born on 18 September 1985 in Newport, South Wales, United Kingdom. He was the youngest child of three children, and lived with his family in a terrace house on Morden Road. During the late 1980’s, the socio-economic climate of the United Kingdom and the rising prices of the property market, resulted in his family emigrating to Western Australia in 1990. The family settled 45km south of Perth in Rockingham, a former seaside holiday town that stood in contrast to the built-up city life of South Wales. The long days were spent in his new home town riding bicycles and playing sports. With the new influx of migrants to Rockingham, new building estates were appearing all around. This transition from one home to the next, along with the visible changes to the landscape, would be the first of many times in Eames’ life that change was seen as an inevitable event. This appearance of change as a continuous force would continue to surface again and again during the young Eames’ childhood. This resulted in him choosing a select circle of friendships and having an outsiders view on situations and events. His school years would prove to be repetitive and uninspiring until Eames entered Upper School. In his last years of school life, he elected to study Photography and Media Studies. These two courses would open up a world of stimuli and provide an opportunity to explore a long-held fascination with the image.
From his longest memory, Eames has been drawn to the cinema and the countless books on Hollywood. With a lack of access to films from the Golden Era of Hollywood, his only option to learn about these films was to visit the local library and read books filled with images and plot synopsis. While reading these books, he would absorb the behind the scenes images of the actors and crew. This would present the artificial world of the movie and simultaneously the real world of the crew creating the artifice. The veneer of glamour over the degraded world of production both being absorbed concurrently. With the immediate satisfaction of digital video, Eames was initially attracted to the world of the moving image. His late school years were spent framing and composing action scenes for his Media Studies course. As he wasn’t able to hire the video equipment over the weekends from the school, he would turn to the Photography Department for his weekend activity. The equipment that would be borrowed most weekends included a Pentax K1000, tripod and smuggled rolls of bulk loaded film packed with 40+ shots per roll. It would be here, during these solitary times with an old camera for company that Eames would be able to create images that pleased only himself. Without a crew and other collaborators to satisfy, he would spend his days learning about composition and tone, colour and contrast, exposure and development. With each roll of film that he developed, he would learn whether his experiment had worked or was forced to re-execute with his new hard earned knowledge. It has been through trial and error, with a continued desire to look inwards to create an external image, that has shaped the photographic style of Eames’ early work. He continues to roam the streets as a solitary artist, creating images that appeal to his inner self. It is when he reflects back on the images as a whole and sees the images that make him feel uncomfortable that he chooses to present these outwardly to the external audience in his published works.