Nonsense began with a simple observation. In a world increasingly obsessed with certainty, very little makes as much sense as we would like to believe.
We build plans, forecasts, strategies, and narratives to help us navigate uncertainty, yet much of life remains unpredictable, ambiguous, and difficult to explain. Photography feels strangely similar. Billions of images are made every day. Almost everyone carries a camera. Increasingly, images can be generated without a camera, a subject, or even a moment having existed at all.
From a purely rational perspective, making yet another photograph can seem entirely nonsensical.
And yet I continue to make them.
I am a designer, writer, innovation consultant, and photographer. Over more than thirty-five years, I have come to realise that every discipline offers its own lens on the world.
Design taught me to see intention. Advertising taught me to see narrative. User experience taught me to see behaviour. Innovation taught me to look for assumptions, patterns, and the things that remain hidden beneath the surface.
Photography offered something different.
It taught me to pay attention.
Not to solutions, outcomes, or explanations, but to moments. To light, atmosphere, coincidence, and the small details that often pass unnoticed. In many ways, photography became less about creating images and more about practising observation.
For almost two decades it has accompanied me through life without any grand ambition or defined project. Most of the images collected here were never intended for exhibition, publication, or commercial use. They were simply moments that caught my attention. Places visited. People encountered. Fleeting observations that felt worth preserving.
Over time, these photographs became something else.
In my book, After this?, I explore the idea that memory plays a far greater role in shaping our identity than we often realise. Looking back across thousands of images made since 2008, I began to understand that photography had become a form of surrogate memory. A personal archive of experiences, fragments, and moments that might otherwise have disappeared.
Nonsense is the home for that archive.
Some images are documentary. Some are personal. Many have no obvious purpose beyond the fact that they seemed worth noticing at the time. Together they form a record of being present in the moment.
Over time I have become less interested in photographs as images and more interested in them as evidence of attention. They are reminders of places visited, conversations shared, journeys taken, and moments that briefly interrupted the flow of everyday life. Individually they may explain very little. Collectively they tell a story.
Perhaps that is the point.
In a world that increasingly asks what something is for, photography continues to offer a different answer. Sometimes it is enough simply to notice.
Instagram @citizenaleks
