Richard Mark Dobson

I make photographs and films to explore existence as both real and malleable — a world at once fragile and fleeting, yet open to reinvention. My practice moves between taking and making: observing life as it unfolds and reshaping it through concept, montage, and narrative. At its core is the belief that reality is not fixed, but pliable — a surface I can bend to serve my inner, imagined fictions. Photography is my compass and my stage, a means to blur the boundaries between what is seen and what is dreamt, and to create encounters where truth and invention intertwine.

From this pursuit, I have carved two frameworks:

Documentary Dreamworks is my cinematic playground where truth blends with fiction, and photography leads the narrative. These are not traditional documentaries, nor fiction disguised as fact. They are something more liminal — dream-traces stitched from real landscapes, real light, real encounters, and imagined histories. In each vignette, I follow the whisper of rumor: a vanished woman, a winter walker, a forgotten postman. Sometimes they exist. Sometimes they don’t. But always, their presence shapes the story. This is slow cinema for the wandering soul.

Slow Witness is my commitment to fidelity to the real. I travel light but stay long. I listen before I ask. I wait for landscapes, people, and time to reveal themselves. In a culture obsessed with speed, I choose to go slowly. In a world of noise, I choose to be quiet. This is not clickbait, not filtered performance. It is earned proximity. It is real work from the edge of the map — border towns, sea-slick ports, forgotten roads where memory lingers and survival eclipses ambition.

Escape Artist Interviews This strand is dedicated to conversations with those who have stepped off the conveyor belt of convention and chosen to live otherwise. Outliers, wanderers, makers, escapees — people who have risked comfort for freedom, or safety for vision. These dialogues are less about biography than about philosophy: why they left, what they found, and what it costs to live a remarkable life. Each interview is a map of divergence — a record of those who remind us that escape is not an ending, but a way of seeing the world anew.

​

​Together, these three practices form my personal genre — an existential documentary-poetic language shaped by dislocation, detachment, and desire. My work does not offer answers but encounters: an invitation to pause, to look, and to confront, however briefly, the truth of our shared existence.

Escape Artist Print Shop

The print shop is where my journeys take material form. Selected works are translated into finely crafted editions — fragments of escape, printed with archival care, to be lived with rather than scrolled past. Drawn from my wider practice of Documentary Dreamwork and Slow Witness, these prints carry the resonance of place, memory, and imagination. Offered not as commodities but as companions, they invite you to bring a piece of the journey into your own space.