Nicolas has an infectious personality, a mixture of cheeky wit and carefree playfulness. For him, photography is all about having fun. It provides him with the opportunity to explore his sense of humour with visual ideas. But to dismiss his work as just jokes, or to see Nicolas as the court jester, is to misrepresent the serious intent and commentary he is seeking to make upon photography.

Nicolas's aim is to address what he describes as the gap between reality and representation in photography. Although we think that a photograph is a window on the world, as a document of truth, Nicolas argues it is always an interpretation of what we think we see and know.

In his series "Paper Bags", Nicolas makes a deliberate choice to work with such famous pictures, images that have become etched upon our collective sub consciousness. He painstakingly recreates them, happily employing the digital technology to construct all or part of the photograph. He sometimes photographs the constituent parts of the original image and then stitches the individual frames together in Photoshop.

When we first see Nicolas's faithful rendition of these familiar images our impression is view them as clones of the original photographs. The paper bags force a mental double take. These images are no mere pastiches; the paper bag changes everything by undermining our certainty in what we see. The paper bag reminds us that this is a constructed image and an interpretation rather than having any pretence to reality. Which is the theme of the whole series.

As Nicolas says, "The paper bag is a way to destroy or reconstruct the original meaning and force the viewer to create all possible ones. What is under the paper bag is up to you."