Photography has become a way for me to express a sense of wonder for this world.  I know very well that there is plenty of ugliness and despair out there, and there are plenty of photographs around to make sure that we never forget it. But I am drawn to the beauty of light, form, and pattern that are manifested everywhere, even in the simplest of things---the extraordinary in the most ordinary. Perhaps, too, there is a futile hope to capture  something of permanence out of what is, by nature, evanescent.

My first love has been black and white photography, on which I was reared from an early age, and it is the great black and white images of the past hundred and fifty years that are most deeply etched into my memory. The reduction of information, the abstraction, and the exquisite gradations of tone that are present in a well printed black and white image from one of the great masters continue to inspire me. But colour sometimes beckons, and there are colour photographs to be seen here too.

The gallery on mathematicians is connected with my professional life, a record of special moments with some of my friends and colleagues, most of them doing what they love most—talking mathematics—, a number of them sadly no longer with us. These are all photographs of the moment, and often, more important than perfect focusing or composition, it is the beautiful expressiveness and overt passion of these people that I so greatly admire.

Stoop down and there it is

Seek it neither right nor left

All roads lead thither--

One touch and spring is present

It's like coming upon flowers in bloom

Like gazing at the advent of the year . . .

My words are scant and beyond emotion

In the distant Harmony of Heaven . . .

Sikong Tu, 837-908

from John Minford, Tao Te Ching