#consolidatingpracticesi

This is a journey through 12 modern ghettos starting in a refugee camp in Tanzania and ending in a forest in Patagonia. In each of these places, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, as editors and photographers of COLORS magazine, methodically documented their inhabitants, and asked them the same questions: How did you get here? Who is in power? Where do you go to be alone? To make love? To get your teeth fixed? For many of those photographed it was their first time in front of a camera. Some looked into it with a hard, penetrating gaze. Others obeyed the ritual of photography with smiles. And Mario, on the cover, turned his back on the camera and waited for the shutter to click.

Much like Broomberg and Chanarins series my project is becoming a social research project as well as keeping its open formation by questioning the power of the photograph. But what I have been thinking about a lot is as I come to make more and more portrait work what relationship should I build with the sitter? Many practitioners interview their subjects whether formally or informally and if I was to do so what questions would I ask and how would they feed into the work. 

Do you think you live in a real area?

What does rurality mean to you?

What brought you to the area?

Stairwell interior, 1950′s social housing unit, Hereford city centre

Racial slang ‘Paki’ inscribed into the wall

What I find interest about this image is the relationship between the colour of the walls and the terminology on the wall. For me the colours found here are very ‘eastern’, it is not a far stretch of the imagination to place it within a scene from India or Pakistan. And so to find the inherently racist term scratch onto the wall creates a dichotomy between the written and the seen which for me are visually intertwined. 

Expired Portra 160 NC

Colour variations from negative (green/yellow) scan to positive scan (pink) and variations of post process. An attempt at distorting the construction of our landscape and to make the viewer think differently toward our idea of ‘rurality’. 

I want to create a picture of our rural spaces but in the hope that I can shed new light on what life is like there. The rural area in focus has its idyllic scenes and a tourist trail but stepping either side of that track are areas which are fragile in their make up. They exist of farmsteads and middle class bohemians who occupy a space which hasn’t changed since the industrial revolution. It is manicured and cultivated and stands defiant to change. Whether that be an issue I do not know but for me these abstract hedge formations create visual structures which are like knots in the otherwise curated borders. 

Expired portra 160 NC - >10 years expired

photographed at ISO 80

The intention would be to use the film on miscellaneous scenes such as the hedge formations, photographed at ISO 20-40 in the hope of creating a lighter red-pink

This film was found in the dark slides of a friend of mine, whom I knew only briefly yet his family were very kind in helping me in my professional life. After the death of his wife he committed suicide at his rural home on the welsh borders, I later found this slides loaded with film. I don’t know if I will use them or what it will mean to incorporate them into the work. But I found his death to be a great tragedy personally and in terms of our societal relationship with the ideas behind masculinity. Within these rural areas that I am looking at depression and suicide are on the rise, it is not a specific theme I want to attach to the work but I feel that an awareness to it can help to build the bigger picture.