James (b.1964) fell in love with photography at an early age. Over the years he has used numerous types of cameras and formats, including 35mm rangefinder and SLR, vintage twin-lens reflex medium format and a beloved Pentax 6x7. He still has most of them and loves just taking them out of their cases and handling them – each one sets off a treasury of visual memories. Through that early period he spent a lot of time, literally in the dark, developing and printing the black-and-white images he had captured. He has worked across all kinds of genres and started a small photographic business whilst at university. He founded and for many years ran an industry magazine called Luxury Briefing which brought together the many different strands of the luxury industry. James has travelled extensively, often writing for other magazines and providing his own photography. Just over 10 years ago his career took a creative turn into another long-held passion – landscape design (see www.ogilvylandscape.com) – which has only served to sharpen his focus on landscape photography.

James and his wife, Julia, lived in Scotland for nearly 30 years but has been coming to Nantucket, off Cape Cod, for nearly four decades and it is a place which he says provides endless visual and spiritual inspiration. The gallery page entitled Thin Places brings together a series of images which were the subject of a 2017 exhibition in Nantucket. The name seemed an apposite one, being a place where, according to ancient Celtic and Christian theology, heaven and earth are especially close. James says it is something he feels strongly when he is in these locations. He is particularly drawn to bodies of water for various reasons: as a huge reflector of the changing sky, as a generator and attractor of magical mist and fog, and as a magnet for birds, which have become something of a signifier in his images. If you wait long enough, he says, one will usually come along! 

The pursuit of a beautiful image has often turned out to be an almost spiritual experience for James. And trying to capture that for others is his ultimate objective - a unique record of a ‘still space’ that can provide a kind of spiritual refreshment whenever you look at it.