Our surroundings affect us - does that seem like a totally obvious and pretty banal statement?

There is nothing mysterious about the way a cold room feels cold, we can account for it through thermodynamics, even make measurements and calculate the transfer of energy. Of course, there are other ways for a room to feel cold that have nothing to do with temperature: a well-heated jail cell perhaps, or a budget hostel? Here we might be responding to the lack of comfort and character, the absence and rejection of human touch that makes the space emotionally cold. And what about the places that send an unexpected shiver up your spine? They might be cosy, comfortable and characterful but still give you the creeps in ways that are hard to pin-down.

The ways that these physical, emotional, even spiritual effects combine to create a “sense of place” are, I think, both mysterious and primal. They are present across cultures and throughout time, appearing in diverse aspects of the human experience from stories of hauntings to histories of sacred sites, practices of feng shui to concepts of ecology even theories of architecture. The Romans ascribed this effect to “spirits of place” or Genii Loci, that manifested as various objects or creatures and acted as guardians, conduits and avatars of a location’s life force. We might find in the Genii Loci a past echo of the contemporary movement to give the rights of personhood to natural features like forests and rivers, which seeks to manifest a legal individual who would stand for and speak for the interests of nature.

In making this series of images I have been trying to simplify and relinquish control over most of the technical aspects of photography so that the fewest of my own decisions are present. Each exposure is a combination of two or more views from the same location made with a lens-less pinhole camera, without a viewfinder and with only the vaguest sense of what the mixture might create. This process maximises the influence of unconscious intuition, coincidence and chance - it creates a space into which the Genii Loci are invited, to affect the image-making and make their presence seen.