Matal Photography

Social documentary, story, culture, life, cinema, photography.

Contacting me

Feel free to make comments about my photographic work, writings or whatever else you like.

I designed and made this site myself so if your comments are relevant, I can add them to the bottom of the appropriate page.

My images are for sale or free, depending on use and my approval.  All rights to use are reserved and negotiable.

If you want to contact me for any reason, please use the email link below.

Click here to send me an email:  matt@matal.photography

About me

My father was a keen amateur photographer with a small black & white darkroom in the old Anderson air raid shelter.  It was there I got hooked on the magic of the developing image.  You can see me with my first camera in the photo above, wearing my school uniform.  That was our first family holiday and the first time my parents had been away.  I have a terrible memory but I do remember seeing my father bring up his camera and take the shot.  I was a shy child so a little surprised.  I don't know why, I had a very loving father as was my entire family including my mother, one brother and four sisters.  I was the last of six children.

For a long time my career was happily in electronics but I gave that up in my late twenties to do something entirely different and more creative.  I took a degree course at the Polytechnic of Central London (now the University of Westminster) and got a distinctly medium BA in Photography.

I tried to be a professional photographer and managed to get some work, the highest point being a photo session with a Scandinavian singer for the jazz magazine 'Wired'.  But I was never any good and so wasn't successful.  I didn't have my own style and mostly just tried to immitate other photographers I liked, waiting and hoping for my own style to appear.  It never did and eventually I realised there was no point producing photos I thought others would like (because they never did) and that I should just take the photos I like and accept that nobody else will.  With the peer pressure removed, I finally started to enjoy my photographs in a way I hadn't before.

I now largely shoot freeflow; not looking through the viewfinder but just pointing the camera in the direction I want.  The camera may be face level or waste level or pointing away to the side, I allow my subconscious to have free control and on the whole it does more and more what I want as I gain experience and see the feedback in my images.  I have found that the more I allow my subconscious to take control the better it gets at taking the photo I am expecting and the less I think about what I am doing the closer the results are to what I have in mind.  I now trust my subconscious; it's my friend and more reliable than I gave it credit for.

My love of unconventional framing was originally inspired by an unintentional shot I took while I was doing a shoot for college and carrying my tripod with camera above my head.  Walking down the corridor of my flat in Wood Green, London the camera went off by itself after bashing against the wall - I found the resulting image the most interesting I had ever taken.  The light walls against the darker grey carpet, ceiling, doors and corridore corners converged producing angular lines with blocks of black and white texture.  My head, body and hand could all be seen from above, coming into shot from an odd angle.  I no longer have the negative or print since almost all my photographs from childhood to middle age have been lost but they are in my memory.

My next inspiration for odd angles came when I was shown the work of the early 20th century Russian artist Alexander Rodchenko while studying for my degree.  I am still amazed by his photographic work.

Since then I have discovered I like to photograph the small details of life; stuff that goes on around us all day, seen but unnoticed.  The shape of a cardboard box, some dirt in a corner, the texture of someone's pullover.  Sometimes I deliberately focus on background detail or leave the whole image out-of-focus.  I am happy with lens distortion, camera shake, motion blur and flare in all its guises.  Many of my photographs have a foreground subject that is blurred with a small part of the background in good focus.  Or the foreground in focus even though the subject is out of focus.  Maybe only a part of the subject is in the composition.  I like all this.  It's how life is where we get just a small snap-shot moment of something.  Nobody walks around with their heads perfectly perpendicular to the planet surface.  I like to capture ordinary life - with all its aberrations.

At last my lack of good photographic taste is unhindered.