Beech Tree i, 2016 - Limited Edition of 10 Photograph

Born in 1952 Hammond lives in London and has been a photographer since aged 16 when he bought his first Rollieflex. Hammond went on to build a successful career in photography, developing a company with 30 photographers which serviced the then-thriving catalogue and print-publications industry. For many years his company housed the largest commercial photographic studio complex in Europe. In 1998 and 1999 Hammond was invited to judge the John Kobal Portrait Award (now Taylor Wessing) exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery, London. Hammond has constantly photographed personal and non-commercial work throughout his working life but like celebrated photographer Vivian Maier, had never felt a compelling desire to exhibit. Until now. Hammond’s personal work is about looking at the world around him. It is about observation. His work is not constrained by obvious categorization. In the landscape collage series ‘Organic Origins’ exhibited in London just before the pandemic took hold, Hammond has explored the way we look at nature and how we often overlook the things we take for granted. After a two-day workshop in Bradford with David Hockney in 1986 Hammond embraced the photographic joiner which Hockney made so famous, as this challenged the perception that the camera showed ‘the truth’. In fact, as Hockney demonstrated in his joiners, the traditional photograph only shows one frozen moment and from just one perspective. In Organic Origins, Hammond has explored nature not just from one fixed viewpoint or one moment in time. His work encourages us to explore each individual element just as we would in a real-world environment. We don’t look at a beautiful tree or a landscape for just a split second. We take our time, our eyes wander all over the scene, we take it all in; the leaves shake in the wind, the waters ripple, the clouds move, the light changes, nothing is static. It might take a few seconds or several minutes - this is the real experience. It doesn’t happen in a 60th of a second. In these works, each square is an individual photograph assembled to make a more complete viewing experience. Hammond has then digitally manipulated the works to bring out detail which is unattainable within the normal colour spectrum thus producing a harmonic coexistence between reality and abstraction.