With influences that include Josef Sudek, Eugene Atget, Walker Evans and William Eggleston, Andy Williams has spent many years evolving his personal visual response to the world around him through both digital and analogue practices.

His approach to this work might seem to be that of a flâneur. He strolls around. He has no plan. But this is deceptive. Not for nothing does he call one major series of images Nature Walk, because in his wanderings he is always observing. And when the moment comes, he snaps into a precise discipline to reveal an image that has been awaiting discovery.

In this, Williams is building on the work of his predecessors and probing one of the essential qualities of the medium. The limits of the photograph’s edge are turned to advantage as they frame found arrangements of the world’s detritus to make images that sing with tension; images that, without the artist’s intervention, would pass unregarded.

Like the famous philosophical conundrum that suggests a tree falling in an unpeopled wood could make no noise because no ears are there to hear it, Andy Williams’ work only exists because of the receptive surfaces that he brings to those odd corners of the world. The medium itself is so ingrained in the photographer that the retina becomes just another sensitive surface, like the digital sensor or sheet of film, on which the image is revealed.

And that moment of revelation can be brief or lingering. It can be the fraction of a second during which the digital sensor receives its impression. Or it can be long seconds of time pouring through a pinhole onto the emulsion covering a sheet of cellulose. In both cases, Williams sets up a vibration between himself and his subject that results in the strained moments of alignment that characterise his colour work or the still, contemplative mood of the pinhole photographs.

Andy Williams studied photography at Bournemouth & Poole College of Art (now The Arts Institute of Bournemouth). He has worked as a commercial and advertising photographer and as a lecturer in photography at the University of East London. His work has featured in a number of group and individual exhibitions, and has appeared in publications including The British Journal of Photography and AG Magazine.

Biography text by Ian Cowmeadow