Ever since I can remember I've been fascinated by the way the decisions I make determine the paths that I'll take on my journey through life. Decisions we make at any given time determine the shape of the rest of our lives. Each road leads to other roads and those roads lead to still others and so on: an infinite number of options. Some roads might intersect, or even lead to the same destination; but there are some from which there is no turning back.

I set foot on the most crucial of my roads of no return when I was eleven years old: I had decided to paint a picture of the Titanic colliding with the iceberg. I don't really know why I decided to paint a picture, or why this subject came to me, but three years later, I was still painting. I had become deeply interested in art and art history. I spent hours painting and looking at reproductions of paintings by major artists, many of whom are still my main source of inspiration. Then came another road, another option. Photography was offered as an option at school. I signed up for the class thinking of it as nothing more than a way of documenting things I might want to paint. When I developed my first photo, when I saw the image coming clear, everything changed. I felt something I'd never felt before: intense, absorbing, wholly personal. The word 'vision' took on a whole new meaning. I knew for sure that photography would be the great passion of my life.

I often think back to the moment when I decide to paint the iceberg, and the path that that decision took me down. I have no doubt that the journey I'm on now is linked to this one definitive moment in my life. The body of work that constitutes "Melt" could never have come into being any other way. During my research into the Titanic disaster, I discovered that the iceberg had almost certainly traveled down Iceberg Alley an area off the West coast of Greenland where icebergs break away from the ice-wall and travel from Baffin Bay to the East Coast of Newfoundland and Labrador, and then enter the shipping lanes.

This portfolio begins with images of the massive icebergs as they enter Greenland's Disco Bay from the Ilulissat Icefjord; it ends with the icebergs off the East Coast of Newfoundland, by which time they have travelled hundreds of miles, and have been so battered and broken down that they are little more than ghosts of what they once were. Seeing them first overpowering in grandeur and then, later, about to be absorbed back into the flux from which they came, is both beautiful and humbling: a metamorphosis that endows them with a life-span, each with it's own personality, each with it's own story. This project had its origin in a wholly personal moment; a personal journey. It is impossible, however, to look at these images and not think of the environmental issues we face right now. Just as the choice I made in my childhood in some ways defined me as a man, so the choices we are making as a species will define who we become, and what becomes of the planet on which we live.

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Shot from a constantly moving point, these images are records of transition, of travel, of movement itself. They are moments that happen all the time but are captured only by the fleet of foot and keen of eye. As we set out, white light falls on cold, crisp scenery giving a feeling of exhilaration, anticipation of what is to come. As the journey continues, this light recedes. Time and distance disappear, momentum is the only constant. Day becomes dusk, clouds close like curtains screening off the day. Edges blur as night's backdrop begins to fall and landscape turns to silhouette, barely backlit. We have reached our destination.

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The photographs in this series take an unflinching look at homeless street kids in Sydney. Harsent has chosen to concentrate on the scars they bear and, in doing so, has managed to transcend the physical immediacy of their environment and look into the minds of these forgotten children. While the tracklines seem the very definition of inner desperation, the artless graffiti — short, staccato and stabbed into flesh speaks outwardly of anger and frustration. But these self-inflicted wounds also seem in some way a personal punishment — a penance.

Could it be that these children, who live on the very fringes of society and largely by their own rules, have not been able to escape the powerful religious notions of guilt and atonement?

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In the calmest sea, in the stillest waters, there is always movement. This series of photographs illustrates this by presenting the viewer with a fixed record of the fleeting forms of light and water — capturing the transient and elusive nature of both sea and moon from a constant point.

The moon, acting as both light source and active protagonist, controlling as it does the ebb and flow of the tide, is seen against the sea's canvas. The image becomes fractured against this moving backdrop and the resulting fragments, these splinters of light, combine to provide a record of a particular moment in time, as individual and unrepeatable as a fingerprint. The resulting reflection is almost painterly and yet has a granular quality — like an ultrasound scan of the ocean, as if nature has been broken down into its component parts and then crudely reconstructed by the camera for the viewer. This in turn, creates an interesting tension, the abstraction of a scene that contains so much that is familiar is made to seem distant, creating a push-pull response that itself echoes the tides of the sea.

However, these pictures also raise questions of causality and assumption, for although it seems almost irresistible to assume that the sea is the author of these patterns, twisting the lunar light into new shapes, it is of course the moon that is the catalyst for movement — calm and stoic behind the scenes.

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There's an appealing honesty that the nude form possesses, an openness and integrity. In order to preserve this, Harsent has stripped bare the process itself. No assistants, no hair and make-up and, most importantly, no direction from the photographer himself. The models were simply asked to pose within a particular space. Shots were taken, discussed, reworked and new choices made. Using a Polaroid type 55 was key to this process, its instant result lending spontaneity to the decision-making process.

In doing this, the work takes on new layers of meaning. The photographs are no longer simply interesting studies of the human body, they become records of personal choice, looking at how each model thought about the way in which they occupy space, given a process that afforded them the time to do so. In looking at these pictures we observe not only an accomplished exploration of shape and form, but also of subjects beginning to study themselves.

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