Nick Egglington

Most of my work has come about from the need to communicate with the outside world due to my ongoing struggle with Bipolar, Socio-Phobia and my sometimes acute anxiety. I have found the camera to be a worthy tool to capture my emotions through pictures – the images often reflecting my current emotions through composition, colour and subject choice. As a result, my work is varied and at times unrelated and disconnected from each other. Overall it is an accurate depiction of how I see the world and the elements that matter to me at the time.

In general, my life has been a fundamental struggle between my desires and my sense of self often resulting in extended periods of exhaustion and incapacitation. As such, my photography has provided me with an avenue to channel myself and at times even force me to look at the very thing I often despise, myself. This is particularly evident in my self-portrait series whereby I spend the majority of my time in the darkness only choosing to light the smallest part of my profile. The darkness can often feel safer than the light, just as success and achievement can be more terrifying than failure and loss.

In most of my black and whites, whether it be architecture, people, weather, or landscapes – I am looking for the emotion in the scene. As people we often associate emotion with behaviours or actions, but as someone with depression who spends vast amounts of time alone – emotion can often be found in everything that surrounds me, and at times in a “black and white” way. The absence of colour in a lot of cases highlights the simplicity of shadow and light and its ability to make me feel the most extremes of the dark end of the emotional spectrum.

On the positive end of the scale, the wilderness is undoubtedly my most favourite place in the world to be, and through colour and capturing wildlife in their natural habitat I hope to share that feeling with others. At my fundamental core, I find the human constructed world grey, drab and void of the magic that nature radiates. As a natural reaction to this perspective, most of my wildlife and natural landscapes are full of colour – the one time when even depression cant get a hold on me.

By looking through my work, I hope you gain a grasp of how I see the world. For a man who suffers from Bipolar, my perspectives of my world are constantly changing and each project I undertake shows that in a slightly different way.

To see more of both my graphic design work and photography, please visit my website at www.grinagallery.com. If you have any questions – don’t hesitate to contact me through the contact page on my website. :-)