Thoughts

A home is more than a private space. It also depends on what is around it: neighbours, shared resources, somewhere to meet, and some say in what happens to the place. The communities I’ve visited organise these things in different ways. None offers a simple answer to how we should live, but each has made choices that the usual model of housing leaves to someone else.

We’ve become used to treating independence as the ability to manage alone. In practice, most of us rely on other people constantly. These places make that reliance visible. It can be difficult and time-consuming, as well as generous. People have to talk, disagree, make decisions and live with them.

Someone who put me in touch with one of the communities said, “It’s just a field. There’s nothing to see.” They were right about what was physically there. What interested me was that the place hadn’t yet been settled. People were meeting, making plans and working out what it might become. I wanted to photograph it while those decisions were still open.

Much of what I saw was maintenance: growing food, repairing buildings, organising meetings, looking after land and making room for other people. These acts rarely look like a grand vision of the future. They are how a place continues to exist.

The prints have a life of their own too. They are pasted directly onto walls, where they can fade, tear or be marked by the weather. I want that change to be visible. It places the work in the same time as the buildings and the people around it, rather than holding the photographs apart from them.

I photograph the places without making portraits of the people I meet. Their voices are recorded separately. You can look at a room or a field while listening to someone describe what happens there, but the two don’t always line up. There is space to make your own connections.

I also remove the frame and glass from the photograph. The image is reduced to a bitmap of black and white dots, printed large and pasted straight onto the wall. From close up, it starts to come apart. From further away, you can read the place again.

I return to the original photograph whenever I make a print and run the bitmap process again. I don’t keep a finished master file. Each print is made for the wall it will occupy, with its own small differences in the image and in how it wears.

The people are still present in the photographs, even when they aren’t visible. You can see where they have worked, gathered, planted or made a room their own. The recordings add their voices without fixing a face to every place.