Photography found me again in Paris, three or four years ago. I’d packed a film camera for a family holiday — almost on a whim — and found myself standing on the Eiffel Tower thinking not about capturing the view, but about how to make something from it. It was a small shift, but it felt significant.
I’m Terry Willows. I’m in my early fifties, and I’ve spent most of my working life in Whitehall and the NHS. Frame to Grain is my attempt to find out whether there’s a creative person in there that all of that might have suppressed.
We live in difficult times. The pace of modern life — the noise, the speed, the relentless demand for our attention — makes it hard to see clearly, let alone think clearly. Photography, for me, is a deliberate act of resistance to that. It forces you to slow down, to look properly, to sit with something long enough to actually understand it. The camera is a reason to pay attention.
The work I’m most drawn to now uses photography as a way of asking questions about the world we’ve made — and what it’s doing to us. My current project, Generation, photographs Britain’s energy infrastructure: the power stations, pylons, and wind farms that power our lives, set against the illuminated cities and glittering advertising hoardings that consume that power. It’s a project about our relationship with the natural world, about what we extract from it, what we leave behind, and how that makes us feel about the world, our environment, and our place in it.
The writing here is part of the work. I’m interested in the space where a photograph becomes evidence for something — where an image carries an argument rather than just a record of a moment.
If that appeals to you — photography and writing that try to look seriously at the world — I’d be glad to have you along.