I’ve been a massive fan of Spencer Murphy for a long time, even as far back as my Ba at Falmouth where he gave a few talks and sessions. I’ve looked at his work a throughout the module and its been really illuminating. In the earlier modules like professional practice I referenced him a lot as he balances personal projects with commercial work and in a way to both sustain and stay creative and focus on projects that mean a lot to him. In his inter voew —— he talks about being facinated with the eccentric and how that was born from a childhood of being left to explore the world in a fairly isolated area. It was this aloneness in borderlands of the contry that led him to explore it with a camera. I can personally relate. I started shooting on 35mm film when I was in school when I was about 14. I was constantly in trouble and being kicked out of classes and I managed to change one of my subjects to photography and when I would leave or get kicked out of the other lessons instead of leaving school and headed to the skatepark I would stay in school and go to the darkroom. Ms Phillips encouraged mwe to shoot more and I was deving films and printing for hours everyday. I can relate to having photography as a reason to explore the world around you, it was my obsession and everything in my life would revolve around it.
Now I run 2 consumer based businesses with photography and film production which affords me the opportunity to shoot personal projects, but I’ve not delivered them to a professional level or really identified the location for my practice until I started the Ma. But looking at artists like Murphy as led me to look at possible arenas to publish work and to also identify an audience and with a little hard work and learning new disciplines ( podcasting) to grow that audience to deliver work that’s meaningful and reflective of certain issues I feel strongly about today ( social media, mental health, loss of community).

Murphy shoots personal work and has had books published via Hoxton press,II can proudly say I own a copy and below are scanned images from his book Urban Dirt Bikers. Murphy won the Taylor Wesslying portrait prize in 2013 and since then has exploded onto the art scene with an agent and commissions for some of the biggest publications the UK and Europe. I want to aim to similar with a focus on personal work that will hopefully lead to commissions. I want to be commissioned to do work that I want to do and feel creatively satisfied with. Murphy talks about how important this is to him.