"But is is art?"

     For all practical purposes, I would suggest that we state that art is what is called art, regardless of medium or any qualitative aspects. To say that something is art does not give it any kind of stamp of approval, but merely describes it as an art object or action. The refusal to accept categories of art because they do not fully reflect a reactionary and conservative view of what art is, as if the category of art were eternal and unchanging, and not historical, is fairly absurd, quiet frankly, and it is a disgrace that this false dichotomy persists in the 21st century. And if I were to create something in a non-traditional medium, make it with every ounce of intelligence and passion, and it were denied the status of art, while, say, a lazy, vapid watercolour of a daisy or a cottage was accepted as art, I have to say something is very wrong.
     Photography would seem to remain contentious in this regard, as many photographs are made with no artistic intention whatsoever. Many are intended simply to record and do so effectively or not, and pretend to be nothing more than documentation. Some photography is undoubtedly great art and it would require a very blinkered person to deny this. (I think that the late Peter Fuller for instance would refuse it this label because a photograph was not made by hand, but he was steadily regressing into the mid-Victorian in both his aesthetics and his politics, and not the most progressive strand of that period either.)
     However, let me say that, by and large, I do not consider my own photographs to be art. This may seem a bit odd, after the previous paragraphs and a strong assertion of the status of art and even a cursory glance at my photographs will reveal that they are quiet different to images of Aunty Ethel at the seaside, so I think I need to state as well as I can what I mean by saying that they are not art.
Primarily, I see my own work as not being aesthetic in function, but documentary. What they document is the incursion of the poetic into the real of the real. That 'real' is frequently a very brute reality of things old and broken, scratched, piled up, left to rot and rust, changed by weathering or vandalism.
     The poetic aspect is the moment that the imagination opens up what might otherwise be nothing more than rubbish, becomes a visionary reinvention of the raw, brutal thing as something entirely other. I have not pretended to complete originality in this work and have named my influences, such as Emila Medkova and Vilem Reichmann, as well as contemporaries such as Roman Kubik and Bill Howe. Whether anybody prefers to call this documentation of poetic evidence 'art' is of little matter to me, all that matters is whether it enables them to see differently.