On Photography and Practice

I have always been drawn to images - glued to television screens as a child, lost in the cinematic, the painted, the pixelated. But photography didn’t call to me until much later. Before 2018, it was just a tool - an extension of memory, a way to document rather than create. When I finally picked up the camera with intention, it became something else: a conversation between thought and instinct, between seeing and feeling.

I often think in images and daydream in fragments. I have always been more comfortable in ambiguity, in the foggy space between knowing and sensing. Photography, to me, is an attempt to make sense of something without fully resolving it - a poetic expression of a moment, a thought, or a fleeting sensation. The act of reading an image, of interpreting its meaning even for just a second, is a kind of quiet magic. It invites us to linger.

Enrolling in the BA (Hons) Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at London College of Communication in 2019 allowed me to deepen this understanding. It allowed me to ask what and why I photograph and to find a community where conversations around images could unfold.

Writing has never come easily to me. Even this blog feels like a struggle. Thoughts knot themselves in my head, making them difficult to untangle, but photography has always given me a way through. I have found comfort in its uncertainty and open-mindedness. I guess my practice exists in this space between clarity and confusion, between instinct and understanding.

Thomas Martin was part of Face-to-Face: Arles Edition 2024.

Check out his Artist Feature Somewhere Less Than Heaven.