54. August 2010: Vicky Slater

"Photography is what I think about most even though it has to fit in amongst three teenage children, a forgiving husband and a disheveled home. It's how I best express myself, how I can connect and maybe make sense of the world and where I am in it. It allows me look at people when normally I'd avert my eye and it's endlessly fascinating. I see more now than I ever did. Six years ago I received a small digital p& s camera for christmas and began thinking about photography but it was some months later, after seeing one of Sally Mann's large format pictures in a book, that I physically felt how beautiful and powerful they can be. I remember standing there with butterflies in my stomach. My first film camera was an old TLR and it was then that things started to feel right, that I'd found the right tool, that it's the whole process I enjoyed as much as clicking the shutter....using 'the hand, eye and heart' I think someone once said. I only use natural light, preferring to keep things simple, and it's often the domestic that I find exciting, the everyday extraordinariness of our lives. I'm interested in the passing of time and our sense of mortality and all the things that make us the same yet different and I'm more likely to be seduced by colour than monochrome though it depends on my mood. I have no idea where I'm going with this, I'm rarely satisfied with anything I've taken for longer than 5 minutes but maybe that's what keeps me going, always knowing I can do much better, try harder, that the next picture or idea might be the one that somehow is so much more than my intention.....really I still feel like I've alot to learn and I've barely begun, and that's how I like it." www.vickyslater.com