ABOUT ME

I am Caleb Dredge

I have been happily married to the woman of my dreams for a quarter of a century now, and we have been together as a couple for more than half of my years on earth. We have five children, who have each managed to distinguish themselves in their own individual ways.

I have spent most of my adult life as a practising lawyer, which is a profession governed by stringent time frames, rules and regulations. My personal experience of my practice as a litigator has been that I deal with the dark side of human nature, and often, meet people at some of the worst times of their lives, both physically and emotionally.

I had, in my childhood and teen years, grown up in a family where my mother was a painter, sculptor and sketch artist, and both my mother and father were musicians who wrote, and sang songs and played musical instruments. My father also did artistic steelwork in his spare time. I dabbled in all of these pursuits in my younger years, but as my legal practice grew, the art in my life slowly took a back seat and was pushed further and further into the background.

In an attempt to extract me from the quagmire which I had dived into headfirst, my wife bought me my first DSLR camera about 4 years ago, and for my birthday booked me on a beginners photography course with DPC. This provided me with the basic tools to take up art again.

I was lucky to have met a photographer, who I consider not only to be a very close personal friend of mine, but also my photographic mentor. Danie Bester encouraged and mentored me in my photographic career, every step of the way, to get me to where I am today.
I worked hard at the basics of photography and experimented with genres of the art form. I bought books and studied many of the works of the masters.

I then began to consider more contemporary photographers and their styles. In this pursuit I came across photographers with vastly differing styles, but who used similar techniques to achieve their final results. I am influenced by Stephanie Jung, Idris Khan and Pep Ventosa. I studied each of them and their work quite intensely.

I decided to try and develop, using similar techniques to theirs, my own unique style of photography. I experience the world around me as being relatively dark and grim and governed rigidly by rules and regulations, and accordingly, I wanted my art to depict the world around me as chaotic to a degree, bright coloured, and beautiful.

I consider my photography to be expressionistic in nature and although it sometimes reflects my own rigidity and obsessive compulsivity, it does express the world more as I would like to see it, than what it really is.