Duncan Petrie?
Who is this guy?

July, 2024  |  London, England

I’m a photographer, writer, and web developer from Milwaukee, based in London.

Download my resume, or check out my LinkedIn.

In 2022, I graduated from Falmouth University in Cornwall with a 1st class degree in Marine & Natural History Photography. Ever since, I’ve been a full time .NET developer (weird pivot, I know). In my free time, I’m taking pictures, writing, and building passion projects like this website.

Photography

Much of my work explores the Yearning, a kind of nostalgia, felt at the edges of things, for lives or worlds that don’t or can’t exist. Fleeting details in the landscape—the tail of a whale rising out of the sea, or familiar music from a window passed at night—act like glimpses into little worlds.

These worlds we find in the cracks of our own are implied and imagined, no more real than a bedtime story, and yet they are far more emotionally true, pull far stronger on the strings of our heart, than actual fact. Their potency is their unknowability; reality would only disappoint.

I explore these timeless and littoral worlds extensively in my photobook, Lingermyth, and my undergraduate dissertation, On Yearning.

Writing

I’ve been building a world, called Springtide, for a long time. There are some stories, some songs, and some entries in a wiki that nobody besides me would find interesting. It’s a sort of happy place, a collection of all the places, landscapes, art and writing I’ve ever loved.

Code

In 2019, after one look at the price of Squarespace, I decided to make my own website, from scratch. Every year or so, I get antsy, and end up remaking it entirely. This is a problem. Too much time working on the website, not enough time making things to put on it. But it’s also fun. Having a website is like having a bedroom: eventually, it gets old and you want to redectorate.

I built this iteration (github) in summer 2024 using Astro.build. The last version (live site, github), built in early 2023, was a Next.js app. Before that, my website was vanilla html/css/js (live site, github).