Statement
I’ve always felt like I’ve had to guard against revealing my whole self. The photographs in Presence are an exploration of the sense of controlling what is revealed or reflected back to the world, and the release from this I experience in the landscape. I often find myself experiencing pressure to reflect back the social cues of different social structures. My identity is drawn from the people and spaces around me, and the ‘real me’ becomes hidden behind a reflection. When I’m out in the landscape I feel free of these pressures. There’s no one there but me, no social structures to reflect. There are no questions, no one to manage, no behaviours to adopt. I enter a state of mindful meditation as I explore spaces finding compositions and making images.
In his practice, Luke investigates concepts around identity, culture and perception through landscape photography. He explores these concepts both through photography of the banality and beauty in landscapes. In his more recent work, through the introduction of physical or digitally constructed objects into the landscape.