I am currently based in the Charente Maritime in southwest France but work all over Europe. Please use the links page HERE for further information about purchasing prints or books. Feel free to contact me about anything on this site or to discuss exhibitions or commissions

T +33 (0)5 46 32 11 36                 M +44 (0)7932 160664                        E john@heseltine.co.uk   

current work

For some years much of my personal work has sought to convey a sense of history, usually directed at specific places in time, but recently I have been attempting something different. My gaze is now directed at familiar objects and enclosed spaces and their potential to form a projection of one's self. These often find equivalents in apparently mundane domestic situations and probe at an innermost thoughts and feelings of a very personal landscape. The inevitable continuum of history reflects the inherent stories we all remember from the past as embodied in our memories and represented by the inherited spaces and things. Photography has become an invaluable tool for me to re-assess my personal space and redefine it along with the inherent contradictions we all have in respect of possessions which become symbols of the past and tactile reminders of our fragile certainties. Relieved of a quest to seek out and record conventional beauty I now seek to define the transient nature of places and things, the fragile boundaries of our domestic comfort zones, the sometime futility of human endeavour, the strange new world we are re-creating, the echo of this very moment, the past and future entwined. You stare long enough and everything becomes interesting.

Much of the inspiration for this new line of enquiry has come from my work with the UK painter, Angela Findlay. The practical experience of this collaboration (www.findlayheseltine.com) has highlighted the different ways in which the two art forms evoke emotional responses, as the photographer seems to struggle with an inherent objectivity that the painter seems to be unburdened by, but still sharing an exchange of materials and metaphors. Clearly this is far from clear cut, but the tactile nature of paint and painting has always been something I almost envied and the digital nature of photography now seems incompatible with my creative expression. So for my current projects I have returned to film photography using the large format camera, not to highlight precise detail, but to exploit the expansive negative area in a way that Angela would describe as being creatively "destructive". Furthermore, use of instant film materials and a move into the historic Calotype process is a deliberate attempt to distance myself from the inherent certainty of photographs and seemed appropriate to the subject matter that does not immediately appear to be of great intrinsic interest.

image library

The archive representing more than 25 years of work can be accessed by the link to the lower left.

commercial folio

Follow the link to the left to view my commercial folio.