Crash

Had I been consulted on the naming of your book, I would have been sorely torn between two titles. 'If You Say So' and 'This is What I've Noticed'. Each describes what I see as two separate but twinned tendancies in your work: 'If You Say So': the portraits. What you describe as the 'self portraits'. Pictures - very often of artists - generally at ease, occasionally commissioned, scrubbed up, or down, according to the level of gregariousness involved, engaged with the camera, quiet if solo, hilarious if in a pack. The public face presented.
The quiet ones ring out, somehow, so much are they the exceptions to the kinetic rule of the herd instinct celebrated in pubs, on beaches, in empty troughs in summer streets, gurning for the lens: rather, these portraits are passport pictures for grown up inspection - the complicit decision to be serious for a moment - Damien Hirst in specs, Cerith Wyn Evans in his moustache, Jeff Wall up against the wallpaper, Tracey Emin tired but happy to be snapped by you even this early.
'This Is What I've Noticed': the moments so entirely of your choosing, snatched from the life around you, so commonly moments of joy and abandon: the Wilsons watching football, russian ballerinas showing off, the Currins snogging, only ever the back of Jay Jopling's head, caught in an embrace/ a deal, Jeff Koons signing fans, Lady Bunny in the gents, the neverending rumbunctiousness of holiday atmosphere, when no one can quite be bothered to notice that you are standing there with a camera. Your pictures taken in Naples are in many ways the stone you cut your blade upon - where your observer's eye becomes refined, where you learned to take photographs of people. You include only one here, of insouciant boys facing you down. And then there are observations of work being done: the methodical, somewhat intellectual, studio and gallery scenes. What an era for polished floors! How studious artists' work feels in these images, how cerebral, how clean. So far from the traditional idea of an artist's studio life, exemplified by the icon of the paint spattered Golgotha, making order on the canvas out of chaos on the floor.
Given this binary universe of your work, I suppose a unified collection under the title 'Crash' must be the perfect solution.
Here's what I see as the point of impact: the slowmotion crunch of intimacy and alienated observation coming together in frame after frame. Lorcan in a blanket under a cloudy Irish hill - a very beautiful and personal image, fullthrottle romantic, yet unmistakably tinged with the self-consciousness of an observer who - while loath to be sentimental, cannot quite resist the lyrical and takes the risk anyhow. Those children dressed up as Mafiosi in Sicily: I can feel your knowingness prickling behind the camera as you bend into it: the frisson of such - potentially - tasteless driving into the curve. Only you, Johnnie, arch self-deprecator, can work quite this particular zing.
I see someone looking at things - at people - that are happy to be watched by you while you photograph them - your drink in the other hand peripheral, but none the less present in the frame, your fag wedged between the fingers with which you focus, with which you press the shutter. I see people comfortable with the fact that they are in your sights - very often they preen towards your lens.
The particular intimacy of that preen - a self-consciousness between only the closest friends - is a familiar intimacy to us all. Holiday snaps. Pub snaps. Chums arranging themselves. Getting recorded.