Background

Prior to leaving school to study psychology at university I had the urge, but not the confidence, to train as a fine artist. During my six years at university I became increasingly focused on visual perception, culminating in the award of a PhD for my research on perception without awareness. In the 46-year career as a university academic that followed, my interests broadened to embrace other aspects of visual cognition (including visual imagery, visual memory, and visual creativity) and, most recently, how visual experience is integrated with experiences emanating from other sensory domains.

After retiring in late 2020, just as the Covid pandemic was beginning to bite hard and restrict us all to solitary activities, I decided to introduce myself to photography as a vehicle for creating engaging visual objects. Apart from the potential satisfaction of creating pictures that people would enjoy looking at, I had in mind the longer-term ambition of discovering how what I had learned about visual cognition might find meaningful application in PhotoArt.

Now twelve months in to my retirement, and with a rudimentary grasp of modern cameras and lenses, and the software available to edit digital images, I realise that I need to learn how to share the products of my endeavours. Creating this website is a first step in this direction.

The pictures on the website are a relatively small sample of the work created by me thus far, and this sample will be changed periodically. Different albums contain pictures sharing a particular theme (e.g., lighthouses), with the catalogues within albums differentiating them further. It is all very much work in progress. For example, there are no pictures on display that have been so abstracted that they have little resemblance to the photographs from which they originate. Such abstractions remain to be developed.

Finally, you will see that some of my pictures qualify as 'street photography' and for which permission to go public has not been obtained from those involved. If you spot yourself featuring in such a picture, and would rather it not be in the public domain, just let me know and I will remove it from the website.

Peter Walker

2nd November 2021/14th March 2024/10th November 2025

Circa 1953. Illustrating how photography has advanced since my early years, and cycles too. I remember the tricycle in this picture very clearly, but not the experience of having my photograph taken.