I'm sorry you feel that way.
This is my personal website. I also use it to showcase my photographs. I agree that they don't add anything to the content.
The people who started this comment thread claim to have skipped your content so they could critique everything else. I wouldn't take it too seriously. I found your content cleanly presented and interesting.
Thank you.
Then its ok :)
Its just funny seeing same mistakes being repeated and various "trends" employed by web developers for no good reason other than "because we can, and it looks cool", but thats ok for personal projects since you are exploring what can be done.
In this case the background image adds absolutely nothing to the user experience or conveys what the content is about, if anything its quite an example of bad design and interferes with the user for no good reason! The "web developer" has added it just because he could not because there is any good and thought out reason to use this "image page monstrocity"