James Mason is a 29 year old photographer from London. He graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Drawing from Camberwell College of Art and went on to study an MA in Cultural and Critical Studies at Birkbeck College.
About ‘Strange Invitation’:
These are images are taken in various cities around Europe and Asia. The project is ongoing, whether in London or elsewhere I will take long aimless walks around the suburbs and peripheries recording any details that catch my eye.
I am attracted to visual ambiguities, things that seem subtly ‘off’ or out of place. These for me provide small departures from the everyday, allusions to something beyond these unremarkable settings. I am attempting to collect these elements together into a visual language that is made up of the things you’d typically expect to find in the street: curbs, pavements, walls, fences, cars, litter, debris etc.
The process of walking and photographing is a meditative one. I try to remain open to the unexpected, to allow things to present themselves to me and not to have too rigid an idea of how I’d like the work to develop. Later on in the editing stage I make more thoughtful decisions as to what does and doesn’t work and consider the relationships that emerge between individual images.
