I collect as I walk.
I walk as I look.
I look as a way of listening.
Objects enter my work through travel, chance encounters, and sustained attention to place. Some are ancient — an Iron Age chariot linchpin, Neolithic axe heads, worked flint shaped by hands thousands of years ago. Others are ordinary and contemporary: a squashed beer tin, worn and discarded. Chronology collapses. All objects are equal once they are found.
What matters is provenience. Where something comes from. Where it was found. The ground it rested in, the hand that shaped it, the moment it was lost or left behind. Removed from context, an object is silent. Held within its story, it becomes evidence.
My photographic practice operates in the same way. Photography is often understood as documentation — a record of the present — yet every photograph is already history the moment it is made. The camera does not simply observe; it fixes a moment, turning the everyday into an artefact. What is overlooked now will be examined later.
Collecting and photographing are parallel acts. Both are ways of slowing time. Both resist erasure. The objects I gather and the images I make form an archive in motion — fragments of human presence layered across centuries. Prehistoric tools sit alongside contemporary debris, not in hierarchy but in dialogue.
The past is not finished. It persists beneath our feet and within our gestures. The future will read our present as we now read the past: through traces, remnants, and things left behind. To collect, to photograph, is to acknowledge this continuum — and to accept a responsibility toward it.
This work is not about nostalgia. It is about attention. About recognising that even the smallest object, in the right place and at the right moment, can carry time within it.
John Byford is represented by:
I. Lohmann, Hannover, Germany. +49 159 04152587