When Does a Photograph Stop Being a Photograph?

It's a question I've been thinking about a lot recently.

Every piece of my embroidered artwork begins with a photograph. Sometimes it's one I've taken myself, sometimes it's an image that has special meaning, and increasingly, photographs captured by my sister as she develops her own photography.

But somewhere along the journey, something changes.

By the time the embroidery is finished, I'm no longer looking at a photograph. I'm looking at a piece of textile art.

The camera captures a single moment in time. It records every leaf, every ripple of water and every cloud exactly as it appears. But an embroidery machine can't simply recreate that image. It has to be interpreted.

The first stage is deciding what to leave out.

Not every blade of grass needs to exist. Every tiny reflection doesn't need stitching. Some details disappear altogether, while others become more important than they were in the original photograph. It's less about copying and more about translating.

Then comes the colour.

Unlike paint, thread has its own character. A single strand catches the light differently depending on the direction of the stitch. Two similar greens can create completely different moods. Shadows aren't blended with a brush; they're built from layers of thread that overlap thousands of times.

After that comes digitising.

This is where the artwork really starts to become my own. Every stitch direction is chosen carefully. Stitch lengths are altered, textures are built, and areas are simplified or enhanced. Sometimes I spend longer editing the embroidery file than the machine spends stitching it.

The embroidery machine simply follows instructions.

It doesn't decide where the light should fall. It doesn't know which reeds should move in the wind or how dramatic a storm sky should feel. Those decisions happen long before the machine starts.

People often comment on how many hours one of my embroideries takes to stitch.

What they don't see are the hours beforehand: studying the photograph, removing unnecessary detail, selecting thread colours, testing stitch patterns, editing countless tiny areas, and deciding exactly how I want the finished artwork to feel.

That's the difference.

A photograph captures what was there.

Textile art captures what I want you to notice.

Recently I've also been creating a new series of smaller embroidered landscapes. They're simpler, quicker to stitch, but they follow exactly the same process. They still begin with a photograph, but every decision along the way transforms that image into something entirely different.

So when does a photograph stop being a photograph?

For me, it's the moment I stop asking, "What does the camera see?" and start asking, "What story do I want the thread to tell?"

That's where photography ends...

...and textile art begins.