ESCAPE ARTIST

“Everything you own must be able to fit inside one suitcase; then your mind might be free.” — Charles Bukowski

A very good Chinese friend of mine once said, “You are like a bird without feet.”
By analogy she meant my restlessness and inability to settle for long reminded her of a bird that cannot land and therefore has to keep moving on.

Fundamentally, she is right.

Photographers by nature are fidgety creatures, but she knows my default setting has always been: move on.

Since leaving my birthplace, Bradford, in 1975 at the age of twelve for South Africa, I have spent much of my life constructing notions of belonging everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

My career as a photographer has likewise been shaped by movement, multiple interests and shifting agendas, played out across very different arenas. I have purposely chosen a varied professional life, straddling the worlds of photojournalism and conceptual photography, while figuratively carrying my office and studio with me through London, New York City, Cape Town, Phuket, Hong Kong, Paris, Johannesburg, Ho Chi Minh City and Penang — cities I have, at various times, called home.

I have been consistently inconsistent in almost every aspect of my personal and professional life, at least by conventional standards. Perhaps that sense of dislocation — of being slightly out of sync — has found its way into the photographs themselves.

I hope so.

The work presented here constitutes, I feel, my strongest work to date. The various categories reflect long-standing interests explored across different photographic genres, while the commissioned projects remain tied to the needs, aesthetics and demands of their respective periods and briefs.

Ultimately, I have tried to curate these collections in a way that remains personal, while still accessible to a broad audience.

Or perhaps more truthfully: I have simply spent a lifetime moving through the world with cameras, trying to understand why certain places, people and atmospheres stay lodged in the mind long after everything else disappears.

Richard Mark Dobson
Hong Kong
July 2020