For the past twenty years I have been known as a hypnotist and someone who writes about hypnotism. In 1996 I was invited by the UK Home Office to participate in their re-drafting of the guidelines on the conduct of stage hypnotism under the 1952 Hypnotism Act. One of the outcomes of which was the incorporation into the cover-circular of my observations regarding the illusory nature of supposedly vivid hypnotic effects. This was a landmark as an official recognition of this fact, the first time since the Franklin Commission of two centuries before.

I have since written three books about hypnotism:

Beyond Erickson: A Fresh Look at The emperor of Hypnosis (ISBN 0-9550731-0-3).

The Art and Secrets of Stage Hypnotism (ISBN 0-9550731-6-2).

Beyond Hypnosis: Hypnotism, Stage Hypnotism and the Myth of “Hypnosis” (ISBN 0-9550731-8-9).

Over two decades I have repeatedly and consistently argued in the press and broadcast media that “hypnosis” as a “state” does not exist and that hypnotism is the art of creating the illusion of “hypnosis”. For example, in The Stage & Television Today in January 1995. Just as a magician creates the illusion of magic the hypnotist creates the illusion of "hypnosis". It is entertaining and can be instructive, but the "effects" are not to be taken literally. Few people really believe that magic is real. Unfortunately, a great many people still believe that “hypnosis” is real!

Before all of this my ambition had been to be an artist. Whilst engaged in various dead-end jobs from the mindless sink-pit of retail (photographic or otherwise) to gallery-guard, from cloakroom attendant to English teacher, I developed concepts in the theory of art which I had picked up before and during my time as a student of History of Art at De Montfort University (in those days, Leicester Polytechnic). I first had drawings published in 1976, painting exhibited in 1978 at Southampton museum of art. Then the beginning of work using Xerox machines shown at Winchester School of Art in 1979. In 1981 I was one of a dozen people short-listed by Tony Cragg to appear in a show at the Serpentine Gallery. But didn’t make the final six. In 1990 I put aside the art ambition to concentrate on hypnotism.

Come the new Millenium I decided to resurrect the art. From working with constructions documented using photography I progressed to my concept of “photo-constructions”. This grew out of the fact that I had been an amateur photographer since the early Eighties and during the nineties used the camera as an aid to my work as a fetish club promoter and then as a tool of portraiture as resident photographer at Bristol’s Comedy Box. The spin-off of these peripheral activities were two books: White Tights & Fetish Nights (ISBN 0-09550731-2-X) and Mirth Merchants (ISBN 0-9550731-3-8).

The latter of those titles contains some of my portraits of a wide range of today's comedy performers and writers, which include Al Murray, Alan Carr, Johnny Vegas, Stephen Merchant (The Office), Reg Hunter, Shazia Mirza, Stewart Lee (Jerry Springer The Opera), Richard Herring, Russel Howard, Mark Thomas, Dave Spikey, Dara O'Briain, Priorite a Gauche, Danny Bhoy, Rod Ghilbert, Kev Sutherland, Geoff Whiting (Mirth Control), Milton Jones, Earl Okin, Adam Hills, Will Smith, Die Klatterschenkenfettermaus, Waen Shepherd (Gary Le Strange) and many more.

As an aside, I might mention that my galleries of fetish images on Flickr took a quarter of a million hits and countless "favourites" in less than two years, before I deleted them. I no longer believe something so popular should be given away so freely!

In art, during this past decade I have shown solo at least once per year, somewhere every year and taken part in various group shows. I was short-listed in round one of Channel Fives “Big Art Challenge” but (thankfully) declined to accept the invitation to take it further. Who needs the snide comments of a reprobate like Brian Sewell when one can pick up plenty of them in the obloquy at the opening night of any two-bit photo-exhibition in Bristol.

Some people ask whether photography is art. It’s a question that only reveals ignorance of what art is about. You dont need to have read Wollheim's "Art and Its Objects" because its really very basic, first-year philosophy of art to grasp that so-called "fine art" isn’t defined by a medium or tool. Painting isn’t necessarily art (in that sense): look at all the painting used in advertising. In that sense of “art” as an historically grounded discipline with an ontology and an awareness of phenomenological parameters, photography has been used by many artists. But it most certainly is not “art” in itself. The mere fact of pointing a camera at something or making pretty patterns with light is not by any stretch of the imagination, in any structurally meaningful sense, an artistic act. Only in the trivial sense of “an art”, wherein any skill such as cookery or horsemanship counts as “artistic”. Even then, only where some technical skill is apparent. Thus defining it as a technique or a craft, not the considered and structurally distinct discipline that is “fine art”. That said however, I have read "Art and Its Objects", apart from other volumes of the philosophy of art and have also contributed in recent years to both "The Philosopher's Magazine" and "Philosophy Now".

In my experience, the kind of people engaged in amateur photography with a pretentious inclination to be “artists” are totally different from those grounded in a “fine art” tradition. Whereas art students and amateur “fine” artists alike generally learn the process of how to “read” or apprehend the questions posed by an image, words, installation, or what have you, the photo-crowd exhibit rather a brain-dead superficiality that merely pigeonholes things according to whatever superficial and stereotypical label they can attach to it. For example, the vapid exhalations I have heard attached to my work that would pigeonhole it alongside Page 3 of The Sun and Zoo magazine. Well, I have nothing against those things, but to look at my work and see it in such superficial terms, whilst disregarding the blatant foregrounding of elements that cue an extended field of reference with depth of meaning is clearly indicative of a truly shallow person.

I have nothing in common with such people. Since I stopped being a portraitist I do not call myself a “photographer” Anyone can use a camera but that doesn’t make them a photographer. Since I ceased to be a provider of the specific service that is portrait photography I consider that I am no longer a photographer. A great many people who use cameras would agree that simply using a camera, as I still do, does not make them “photographers”. Unfortunately, there seem on the other hand quite a lot of people who do make such a claim for themselves. Some people seem to think snapping away on a clapped out Canon in itself qualifies them to call themselves “photographer”.

I am, rather, someone who uses photography in my work as an artist and who carries a camera often, just for fun. I would not consider exhibiting the images I have shot for fun in a gallery. Why would you? But, many people clearly do!

Recent shows (2009): "Art with QR". Work combining photographic images and QR codes to integrate the object displayed with live, real-time internet resources. At Amoeba, 10, Kings Road, Bristol. 6th - 29th October.

"Photo Povera & GeeHa!" with Ben Dobson ( Weston ) and Clare Schreiber ( Oxford ). At Photographique, 12th-18th November.

Ongoing showing: The Comedy Box, above the Hen & Chicken, North Street, Bedminster, Bristol. Portraits of comedy performers.

Some photographic Biog'

Given my first camera (Kodak 126) in 1968.

Bought my first SLR (Zenit E) in 1985.

Bought my first medium format SLR mid '90s.

Started to go digital in 2001.

Was photographer in residence at the Comedy Box from 1999 until 2007

My favoured cameras are still medium format, but the expense of film ( especially 120 ) and the high cyclic rate demanded by the way I work with models ( shoot-review-reshoot ) means that I almost exclusively use digital.

You will have to copy and paste the following links into the address bar as they are not embedded:

www.hypnodrome.zoomshare.com

www.geeha.zoomshare.com

www.negrafix.zoomshare.com

http://www.thecomedybox.co.uk/site/index.asp?ID=336