Documentary & Street Photography
Documentary & Street Photography
Statement
Photography, for me, begins with the decision to slow down — to stand in a place long enough that the ordinary reveals something it wouldn't have otherwise given up.
I work in street and documentary traditions, based in Scotland. My approach requires commitment before the moment arrives: zone focused, pre-exposed, held. I've found that constraint is not a limitation but a discipline — one that has changed how I see as much as what I photograph. Presence over subject matter, experience over understanding. The photograph either happens or it doesn't.
The work is drawn to thresholds: the pause between actions, faces caught between expressions, landscapes that make no demand on the viewer. Moments that would dissolve unnoticed. Genuine witness means not aestheticizing or explaining, but being present enough that feeling registers before the mind moves to name it.
This inquiry runs through both the photographs and the writing. Adequate Light — an ongoing series of photoessays — approaches the same questions from the other direction: what philosophy, and particularly mindfulness practice, can illuminate about the act of seeing, and what photography gives back to that practice in return.
Essays by Drew Death
Adequate Light is an ongoing series of essays at the intersection of photography and philosophy — although this may change, as all things do.
The writing asks the same questions the photographs ask: what does it mean to actually see something? There are no conclusions here. Only the attempt to stay present to what's in front of the lens, or the page.
It is the ordinary light of ordinary moments, and what it asks of us to look at them honestly.
The full archive lives on Drew Death's Substack. New essays on photography, philosophy, and the practice of seeing — published when there's something worth saying.
Read Adequate LightAvailable for editorial commissions, exhibition proposals, and residency collaborations. For MFA and institutional enquiries, a full portfolio PDF is available on request.