Paul Kenny approaches image-making as an evolving conversation between idea, process, and material. He does not begin with photography as a fixed method, but with the need to make images about the world around him. Over time, that has led him through major shifts in technique and production: from analog to digital, from monochrome to colour, from camera to scanner, from paper prints to lightboxes, and from still images to moving work.

In the field, what first prompts him is something that creates or consolidates an idea already active in his work. He often carries a small LUMIX camera and an iPhone as a kind of sketchbook, using them to test, gather, and process visual thoughts quickly. Yet the finished work is the result of longer development. He describes working with a toolkit of concepts and techniques that he constantly reuses, while remaining alert to new thoughts that may alter the direction of the work itself.

Projects often develop through exhibition frameworks. A few images may suggest a larger body, which is then expanded in the studio until the group feels coherent enough to present. For him, coherence depends on visual motifs, mood, and consistency of ideas. His long-term output is, in his own words, one continuous project, shaped by instinct, experimentation, and the careful refinement of thought through photographic means.

Paul Kenny’s conversation offers a particularly rich account of photography as a medium that is never static. Readers learn not only how his work has changed over time, but how he understands change itself: as something built into the history of photography and into his own practice. One of the most revealing ideas in the interview is his refusal to put the medium before the message. He insists on making images about the world around him, with photography serving as the chosen means rather than the subject.

The interview also clarifies the structure of his thinking. He speaks about visual communication, about images that carry not only what an artist saw but also what they thought about what they saw. He explains the relationship between Seaworks and O Hanami, the value of recurring motifs, and the importance of finding complex ideas within seductive surfaces.

Equally valuable is his discussion of process: sketchbook cameras, exhibition deadlines, studio development, framing, lightboxes, and the move into moving image. Taken together, these reflections reveal a practice grounded in experimentation, coherence, and long attention, while showing how a photographic language can grow across decades without losing its central concerns.

Paul Kenny belongs in Voice of the Eyes because his work demonstrates how photography can remain both materially inventive and intellectually focused over a lifetime. His images do not rely on spectacle alone. They ask for slower looking, and they reward it by opening into questions of fragility, ecology, wilderness, scale, and the structures through which we make sense of the world.

His perspective is especially valuable because it joins artistic seriousness with formal experimentation. Over more than fifty years, he has continued to adapt to changes in photographic technology without abandoning the core concerns of his work. That continuity within change makes his contribution particularly relevant to a publication interested in how photographers see, think, and evolve.

He also offers a language for describing photographic intention with unusual clarity. Whether speaking about the micro and macro, about coherence in a body of work, or about the relationship between beauty and thought, he gives readers insight into a practice that is rigorous without becoming rigid. That combination makes his presence in the book both necessary and memorable.