contact:

email: inquiries@andrewcondon.com
postal: Placa Mirador, 3, Els Omellons, Lleida 25412, Espana
phone: please contact me by email first.

I am available for assignments, especially those involving travel to interesting places.

bio

I was born in the west of Ireland in the second half of the twentieth century ('67) tho' it seems much more distant than that now. Photography is my second career, i already served my time before the corporate mast in the field of information technology for 14 years. I started taking photos in '96 because i was travelling a lot and it seemed like i should have something to show people where I'd been.

Immediately I was surprised to discover that photography reports not just what we see but how we see the world. A very obvious thing, but it was a revelation to me. All those times that i had said to somebody "look at X" or "how strange that Y is" I had naively thought that they were seeing the same thing as me! Showing my first few rolls of images to people i immediately discovered that when something is a subject of a photo people are actually more likely to see how you saw it than if they were there at the time alongside you.

Later i discovered that I could use technique to clarify the concept of a photo and increase the chances of it being interesting to other people but initially I spent a number of years just taking snapshots in this way deliberately ignoring technique or equipment. This was, I'm sure, a reaction to both the technology-heavy nature of my work then and to the stereotypical photographer/hobbyists that i had known who were more interested in their light-meters and filter sets than in actually making images.

Largely from the same desire to take photos naively and not caring if they were good, bad or indifferent, I also remained mostly ignorant of the history of photography throughout this period - most of my photographic and graphic influence was from cinema and painting. Indeed, i would still say that the films and cinematographers of Leos Carax, Krystof Kieslowski and Jim Jarmusch probably still mean as much to me as any still photographer. There were certainly photographers whose work i loved (Man Ray and Jan Saudek come to mind) but they weren't influences because i had absolutely no idea how they worked or how they were coming to their subjects.

Over the last couple of years, however, I have been much less hermetic about this, perhaps i'm less afraid of being influenced now. Now that I've learnt enough to mimic others I have also understood how impossible it would be for me to do so!

about the site

This is more or less a static, portfolio page, designed to give you a flavour of my work and, if to provide a permanent link to my photo-journal (currently housed at smugmug.com). The journal is very frequently updated and available thru an RSS feed. Please note that I designed the galleries to be scrolled from left to right like a film strip and not down the page.

about the work

The most succinct description that I can make of my work is that I'm searching for grace with the understanding that it surrounds us at all times if we can but open up to it. When my work stops someone and gives them space to slow down and accept that grace, then I'm happy.
Even less than writing bio information, I do not enjoy writing about my photography. Whenever I have written about it I have discarded the results or shown them only to close friends and circulated them no further. I believe that this is so for quite paradoxical or contradictory reasons. On the one hand, it feels quite unnatural and, in some vague way immodest, to talk about my work. So I feel that I would like the work to speak for itself, to stand on its own merits.

However, work which speaks for itself can really only articulate one thing: the author's aesthetic. And imposing that on others without providing anything else seems, too, to be immodest and egotistical. Besides, this point of view, where I feel that there is nothing that the work is saying and that there is no message and that I do not wish there to be one, arises not because I have nothing to say but rather as a reaction to the relentless messaging of our media-saturated world.

If Beckett, in the middle of the last century concluded that words are a stain upon silence, today I feel that ever-cheaper and more accessible tools for visual expression combined with a culture that has all but surrendered to corporatist environmental suicide have brought us to a point where it takes quite a lot of nerve to add images to the assault.

Millions of people dedicate large percentages of their lives and perhaps nearly all of their creative energies to making art that is used to sell other things, things that no-one needs and, that, without their creative window-dressing perhaps no-one would want.

It's a monstrous out-pouring of environmentally unsustainable and aesthetically debased mass production masquerading as personal wish-fulfillment and self-expression. Essentially, the rise of the tools of visual expression - just such tools as I used to make these images and write this website - has wrought a rising tide of accelerating pornographication of every visual sphere. It's not surprising, just natural selection in the marketplace, but it is repugnant and I when I think about it, which I do a fair amount, I am tempted to conclude that I want no part of it.

However, ultimately I don't buy this line of thinking - I'm not going to shut up just because there are already too many beautiful car ads, swimsuit model ads, shiny electronic doohickeys and exotic imported foods competing for attention! But it is a reason to be careful.

In contrast to the manifesto of, for example, Banksy (whose art I love nonetheless). I strongly agree that it is an infringement of our civil liberties for corporations to fill the public space with advertising but I don't wish to fight it thru producing more public imagery to compete for attention.

If I'm going to add images to the pyre I want them to I wish to make art that encourages people to find a space of tranquility and peace in themselves and which at the same time unsettles and provokes them rather than stimulating and distracting them. I wish to make a small number of photographs that can be looked at for a long time. I want to make work that is:

  • Beautiful (not pretty)
  • Celebratory (not condemnatory)
  • Quotidian (not spectacular)
  • Hand-crafted (not mass-market)
  • Place specific (not "globalised")
  • Honest
  • Private
Of course, it's not at all clear that this is compatible with commerce...if it isn't then I will have to find some other way to make money!