What I’ve learned in the first 4-5 months of my studies is the need to have a central place to hold the multiple threads together. I’m not sure if this is the place but let’s see if it can at least help me to tell the story without too much maintenance stress!

How did I get here? I’ve often sang the Talking Heads hit which includes this lyric and empathise profoundly with the wider sentiments of Letting the Days Go By - and yet however unclear life’s plan seems on a daily basis you can usually look back and see that golden thread of chance, effort, obstacle, opportunity and luck that loosely guided the path.

The formal start for this PHD exploration began October 2025, but the pathway to that point has taken many twists. Recently sorting through old family photos I found a carefully save newspaper cutting which has the headline “young photographer captures a big moment” - there I am with my primary school peers, and probable cornflake-packet-offer plastic film camera capturing a politicians ribbon-cutting to open the road that would provide new, and transformational, access south of my north-west highlands village, but which over 50 years later continues to alarm road and rail users with regular rockfalls.

Fast forward through a long life of undergraduate study and corporate employment - accompanied by a succession of cameras to match the changes in technology - to where an opportunity for a career break provided re-ignition of this long-held passion for photography. Formal studies at NESCOL set the technical grounding for a subsequent BA and MA at Gray’s School of Art/RGU - and the transformation from a more technical landscape practice to a much deeper engagement with the natural environment and discovery of alternative photographic techniques which allow plant matter to become a material part of the image, complementing much more appropriately my evolving theoretical explorations.

Many people talk of the one thing that proved a catalyst for a change of course - and my life has experienced many such pivots. The one which initiated that embryonic idea of progressing my studies? A lecturer, previously unknown to me, was called upon to assist with staging an interim exhibition. On appraising my work, he said - “I think you have a PhD in this”.  A seed sown and a phrase that ran round and round in my head over the subsequent months.

And so, let’s find out if this will indeed turn out to be true…..
Fortitude