Courage and knowledge

Down another strand in life, I am a photographer; probably shooting only half a dozen times a year; portraits, branding, that kind of thing.?It’s a way to keep the creative side of the brain working and has crossovers into the advisory work that I do (cue analogies on seeing things differently, casting a new light, focussing on the key subject).

I had the pleasure recently of photographing for Mosaic, a collaboration of professionals who come together principally to advise on legal firm transactions; mergers and acquisitions, restructuring, succession.?They amalgamate together, advise and then go back to their separate practices.

They are men, mostly of a certain age and they gave me a free hand to shoot them as I saw fit and I chose to challenge the status quo.

In the 1960’s, Raymond Cattell developed his concepts of crystallised and fluid intelligence.

Crystallised??This is learned procedures and knowledge accumulated over time.?

Fluid??This is reasoning, deduction and similar approaches that rely minimally on prior learning.

Men of a certain age and profession??It’s got to be big on the Crystallised end of the continuum, hasn’t it??The imagery ought to be sharp suits, yellow ties and images of pretending to sign documents; you know the sort of thing.

But this isn’t who they are.?They are primarily fluid thinkers because every situation that they engage with is different and sometimes radically so.?

So, we ditched the ties and the desks and pens and headed for the Northern Quarter in Manchester; to capture these adaptive people, modern thinkers who really can’t be pigeon-holed.

And this is what we produced together.

Something of the ‘former band members getting back together after 25 years’

Something of the ‘Time Lord regeneration’

And a little nod, perhaps to Monty Python ??

You can’t pigeon-hole these people.?They are the real winners; adaptive AND crystallised knowledge.

And a great sense of Adventure and Humour.

The final step will be having the courage to use the images in their online existences; I believe it is due to happen ??