Photography
“Photography feels like stepping outside myself.” — Xander Jefferies
Xander's approach to photography
“Photography feels like stepping outside myself...” Xander Jefferies
Photography wasn’t a natural path for me. It didn’t arrive the way watercolour did, or settle into my practice the way acrylics eventually did. It came from the edges — a kind of outlying love, something I reached for when I needed distance from the uncertainty of watercolour, or the slow process of acrylics, and from the intensity and mess that can surround these ways of working.
Painting can be intimate. You’re inside every mark, every hesitation. But photography… photography lets you stand back. It asks you to notice rather than intervene. I think that’s why it stayed with me. It gave me a way to look at the world without immediately trying to translate it.
What I like most is that moments pause before the shutter snaps. That tiny moment where you’re not creating anything — you’re just recognising something. A shape, a shadow, a quiet arrangement of things. Muted atmospheres reveal kinship; rain and motion suggest a yearning. It’s a different kind of listening. Less about interpretation, more about acceptance, and about capturing that in a moment.
I tend not to chase spectacle in my photogaphy. As in my other artwork, I’m drawn to the small, unremarkable things — the way light falls on a wall, or how a path curves for no reason, the shadow cast by a gate, or the tired dignity of an object that’s been left where it shouldn’t be. Things most people walk past, I suppose. I’ve always felt more comfortable with the overlooked, the ordinary, things that just exist without making a fuss.
What photography taught me — or maybe reminded me — is that meaning doesn’t have to be constructed. Sometimes it’s already there, waiting. With painting, I build a thought. With photography, I find one. Or maybe I let one find me, who knows..?
Although I've more recently dabbled in things like Photoshop, there’s no layering in my photogaphy in the same way as you find in acrylics, no burying of ideas under other ideas. But there is a kind of layering in the world itself — the history of a place, the weather, the mood you’re in when you see it. A photograph holds all of that without openly insisting on any of it. It's a truly fascinating art form and one, you can probably tell, captivates me more and more as time goes on.
And the restraint… that’s familiar to me. You can’t force a photograph. You can’t make the light behave, or the moment repeat itself. You wait, or you miss it. It’s humbling. It keeps you honest to your trade, and alert to the world. I honestly think that, the more i submerge myself in photography, the more I observe in the world around me - much more so than the other mediums made me do.
So yes — photography sits a little apart from my other work. It’s not the medium I reach for first. But it’s the one that reminds me to look. To step outside my own head. To let the world speak without me trying to answer back.
In its own way, it shapes me just as much as the paints ever did.