Writing
This section includes my academic publications and critical reflections on photography, visual culture, and language. You’ll find downloadable PDFs, bibliographies, references, academic citations, and publishing details. (Clicking any links at the bottom will take you outside this website).
Reading Pictures: A Visual Approach to Language Teaching
Reading Pictures grew out of my belief that language and images belong in the same conversation. After years of teaching and making photographs, I saw how visual thinking could unlock linguistic understanding in ways that traditional methods couldn’t. In the book, I explore how photographs, symbols, and narratives shape meaning and how they can be used to teach language more creatively and critically. It’s part guide, part reflection—a framework for teachers and learners who want to move beyond rote learning into visual communication. My aim was to show that reading images can be as vital to literacy as reading words.
Staging Suffering: Photographic Ethics in the Representation of Pain, Poverty & Pathos
In Staging Suffering, I question what it means to represent other people’s pain through photography. Using my own project Precious Poverty as a case study, I explore the moral and emotional territory between empathy and exploitation. I wanted to understand how constructed imagery can reveal social suffering without reducing it to spectacle. Drawing on theory, ethics, and my own practice, I examine how we, as photographers and viewers, share responsibility in shaping the way suffering is seen. It’s both a critique and a confession—an attempt to reconcile artistic intention with ethical awareness.
