A friend of mine used to say, “It’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey,” and he wasn’t wrong. I think I lived by that line for years because it helped me stay young, or maybe because it reminded me to keep moving when standing still never really felt like an option. Sixteen years of photography has given me a journey made up of memory, fatherhood, friendship, family, and the foundations underneath them. Those foundations are still the reason I do what I do now.

I spent the last £500 I had on a camera and a couple of lenses so I could record my son’s journey through life. There was no business plan behind it, no real financial sense in it, and absolutely no real knowledge of photography. What I did have was the feeling that time was already moving and I needed a way to hold onto something that mattered before it passed too far beyond me. At the start, that was all it was. Not a business. Not a strategy. Just a need to remember.

I came to a sobering realisation last year when I hurt my neck using a microscope for two days solid working on a project. Somewhere along the way, I had started to drift from that original reason. As Koen moved towards his last year at school, I could feel something tightening in me. The journey that had once felt so open suddenly felt like it was closing. I found myself slipping back into old patterns, patterns that took me far too long to recognise even though I had seen them before. I knew I had to go back, not forward, and find the spark underneath all of it. Ironically, while I was trying to return to foundations, my son was stepping into his own, in his last year at school and wanting to starting out on the building site and beginning his own life in a very real way.

Most people who have followed my work for a long time will know that Koen has always been a huge part of it. He has not just been present around the edges. He has been one of the main reasons the work exists at all. Photography began as a way of holding onto his life as it unfolded, and over time that widened into a way of understanding my own. That is why this story could only ever end with him behind the camera taking this photo before moving on.

Before photography, life moved around a lot. Spain, the UK, Guernsey, building sites, removals, concrete, instability, and the kind of years that teach you quickly even if they do not teach you gently. International schooling in Spain was tough without the language and support. The bullied become the bully, leaving at 13 to face the working world far earlier than I should have done. Kicked out of home not long after for not being able to sustain a job, moving between building sites, then to removals where I met and lost my best mate Colin, one of the only people to give me a chance growing up when I had nothing else, I struggled to hold work together and made some stupid choices, yes the kind of stupid shizz we all do as kids. I moved through jobs and places with very little underneath me that felt fixed.

By nineteen I found myself sleeping in the back of a Mark 2 Fiesta by the salt lake in Torrevieja, baking in the day, freezing at night, getting eaten alive by mosquitoes, then back to laying concrete for large scale complexes, schools, driveways, a few high-rises in Benidorm as well as one of Alicantes Airport hangers. One of my best mates that I grew up with asked if I wanted to move to the UK. Leave it all behind, new country, new faces and a language I couldn’t read or wright in, just about speak. I took the chance. Plymouth lasted three months. I had no National Insurance number, no bank account, no proof of experience and no real footing. I was lucky to still have contact with my sister in Guernsey and had she not offered for me to come and stay with her, I most likely would have ended up back where I started, in the backseat of that car. Again I needed those foundations to build on, although born in Guernsey the first 10 years where hard, having to move around all the time, never having a place to call home, having to live with other people, trying to raise my son in the best possible way and non intentionally starting a business. Stuck in this constant performance paradox, I knew I wouldn’t be doing it on my own this time, but with Koen by my side. This takes me back to the images, I knew if I was to have a true depiction of who I am, Koen would be the only one that could take it, a true honest reflection of who I am.

The real spark for this portrait came from my last two school reports, hiding inside the only portrait I ever drew as a child. Of all the faces I could have drawn, it was Frieza. There is still something funny and slightly perfect in that. But what mattered more was what it revealed. It reminded me that some things stay with you quietly for years, waiting for the right time to reappear. That drawing, held next to those reports, became more than a memory. It became a marker. Proof of where I had been and of how much of the work now comes from trying to bring clarity and confidence to places that once felt messy or inconsistent.

The older photograph of me and Koen matters because it shows that the night didn't begin in the studio. It was built over years. Years of life, growing, changing, and quietly passing the baton without fully realising it. By the time we came to make these portraits, something had already shifted. He was no longer only the boy whose life I had tried to document. He was becoming the one capable of reflecting my own back to me with pure honesty.

So the night itself became more than a portrait session. We built the set together, played with ideas, laughed through the looser frames, and slowly moved towards something steadier. The process mattered. The equipment mattered. The in-between moments mattered. The playful portraits mattered. The edits mattered. None of it felt separate from the final image. It all belonged to the same night, the same trust, and the same return.

People often say that an image speaks a thousand words. Maybe it does, but I have never believed that is the whole truth. An image does not just speak. It carries. It carries memory, context, silence, pain, humour, labour, love, and everything that cannot be read from the surface alone. It carries the relationship between the person making it and the person inside it. That is why I care so much about honesty in portraiture. Not because I want things to look serious for the sake of it, but because I think somebody’s image deserves respect.

That is also why this portrait had to be made this way. I knew that if I wanted a true depiction of who I am now, Koen had to be the one to take it. A real reflection, not something over directed, not something built around performance. Just an honest image and an honest editing process, shaped by experience, belief, family, friendship, and a growing willingness to let go of the noise around it all.

After the set had been built, the portraits made, the edits worked through, and the moments in between allowed to settle, Koen offered to cook for me. He made an epic pasta bake. It was one of those ordinary, unforgettable endings that tells you the real point of the whole thing. The portrait mattered. The process mattered. But what stayed with me most was the feeling that something had been released. I could let go. I could move on. And more importantly, I could allow my boy to move into his own life with confidence.