A strong rapport with my subjects is at the very core of my photography. I don't just want to document a moment but I strive to capture the essence of that moment. I am sometimes out of sight and in the corners of a space but am more often known for climbing into the rafters or crawling on the floor and in the ditch to get that shot that sums up that particularly precious time and space. The rock band, the wedding, the fundraiser, the welder and the graduate all hold amazing image potential for your scrap book, website, album cover or perhaps a special gift.

The finished photos can be useful on their own or they can be used for collage...

My mixed media photo collage art is about the experience where actuality and vision meet – the reality of a given space or time and the preconceptions and associations that are brought to that moment and place. As a third culture kid, a diplomat's spouse and an American expat I have made a life as a professional stranger. I am always living between cultures and drawing connections between what is in front of me and what associations come to me as a result.

Each culture I've been living in has each had its moments of familiarity and otherworldliness. For instance, Taiwan's computer market - chock-full, floor to ceiling with the latest in high-tech wizardry while surrounding the computer shops is the antique market with items starting with Mao and going back beyond Ming. Accra, Ghana's juxtaposing jumble of joys, raising my infant and toddler daughters, was filled with new experiences of household staff, communication gaps and unidentifiable diseases all the while harkening back to my own regular childhood of visits to my mother's home of South Africa with its flowers, fruits and similar rhythms. Poland, Nepal and Uganda all have handed me these moments of verisimilitude and envisioning, of a harsh new reality next to what I've often encountered and strangely familiar.

The Art of Julian Parker-Burns