SELF PORTRAIT

I was born and brought up in South Africa. My mother's parents had come from Holland, while my father had an English father and a mother of long term settler stock, with Dutch and French in her origins. My childhood, from the age of two, began in the seaside city of Port Elizabeth, after which we moved to the gold mining and financial city of Johannesburg, at an altitude of six thousand feet. My parents both loved the landscape, mountains and the sea, but also the open veld of the South African countryside. My father was a photographic enthusiast, and it was at the age of three that I first saw photographs emerging from the white paper as they developed in a red-lit darkroom. I was given my first camera at seven, and by the time I was a teenager I was competent with photographic darkroom techniques.

I began my architectural education at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg at the age of sixteen, and there our professor, John Fassler, awoke in me a passion for the great Gothic cathedrals: in a city eighty years old I fell in love with an architecture eight hundred years old. Photography was of immediate service. Then, just before my twenty first birthday I found another love, ballet, and to my astonishment, and that of everyone about me, I found that I had a natural talent for dance, which I took up with enthusiasm, and four years later was dancing on the London stage at Sadlers Wells Theatre and the Covent Garden Opera House, appearing in performances featuring artists like Margot Fonteyn and Joan Sutherland. I came to London at the age of twenty five, danced for two years and then gave it up and reverted to architecture. I also then met Colleen Foster, another South African, and a couple of years later we married. Our daughter and three sons are all grown up, and live, like us, in London.

As an architect I have specialised in the field of the terminal care hospice, and have been involved in several of the most important, and most complete, in England. My two vocations, architecture and photography, were married, and photography became my vehicle for communicating the quality of architecture, especially the Gothic, in lectures, in the books I illustrated with my great friend, the late William Anderson, and many other published pictures, as well as radio and television. Our books extended beyond architecture, and brought me back to the photography of landscape, nature and holy places, and to the search in carvings and folk customs of the Green Man, the archetype of our oneness with nature and the universe. The profound implications of this image resonated deeply with my long study of wisdom traditions and philosophy, essential self-knowledge.

THE PHOTOGRAPHS

All the photographs in this web site are my own, from my picture library of about a hundred thousand images covering nature, landscape, holy places, and mainly, architecture - cathedrals, churches, temples, castles, mansions, towns, houses, and prehistoric structures, all over Europe, but also in Mexico and South Africa. I have visited and photographed most of the significant Medieval churches of Europe, and, in particular, have sought out the images of the Green Man, the subject of our most successful book ("Green Man" by William Anderson, published originally by HarperCollins, but republished in Britain by CompassBooks).