After graduating from Glasgow School of Art in 1999, I decided I'd never
call myself an artist. It always sounded like a joke when I said it, so I
just stopped - but I love taking photographs. I look at them as pages in a
diary, detailing the places I've been, and capturing some of the atmosphere.
After working for a few years selling wine, drinking wine, and saving up
for trips to interesting places, I soon realised that no matter where I
went, I was always the same, and the photos I took reflected that. So
whether I'm walking up 5th Avenue in New York, sitting in a cafe in the
south of France, or standing outside Partick train station in Glasgow, I
always see the same people, the same doorways and shop fronts. And so the
photographs I take are universal - nationalities and locations are
unimportant when you capture someone's face in a moment when they don't know
anyone's watching. And those are the times when the ordinary becomes
something worth looking at, like something you've never seen before.
But it wasn't until I showed my photo's to friends and family that I
realised I had something interesting. I'd had work in a few exhibitions,
but was never really sure about how successful they'd been, so i decided to
do things differently...
I had made cards and books before, and there was an obvious link with
the subject matter - the ordinary becoming extraordinary. Because of this, I
see my work as constantly evolving, so if its true that the more things
change, the more they stay the same, then I have an unlimited source of
ideas on the other side of my own front door.
Jamie Maitland 2003