Between Myth and Reality : James Dobson on Locust Years

June 29, 2021 Tom Skinner

“For deep time is measured in units that humble the human instant: millennia, epochs and aeons, instead of minutes, months and years. Deep time is kept by rock, ice, stalactites, seabed sediments and the drift of tectonic plates. Seen in deep time, things come alive that seemed inert. New responsibilities declare themselves. Ice breathes. Rock has tides. Mountains rise and fall. We live on a restless Earth".

Interview by Tom Skinner

TS: Viewing the images in Locust Years, I'm reminded of the above excerpt from Robert Macfarlane's Underland, A Deep Time Journey. Particularly the images of eroded sandstone and a thatched cottage, seemingly ready to be reclaimed by the landscape. How has making this project shaped your view of our relationship with the land?

JD: Making this work I’ve been thinking a lot about entanglements of nature and culture, the patchwork of field, wood and village that define popular notions of rural England, forming the backbone to the national myth of a green and pleasant land. At the heart of this supposed harmony between humans and nature, is the idea of ‘timelessness’, the idea that things haven’t changed since a time beyond memory; how is it that this narrative has endured considering the disaster of habitat destruction and species extinction currently unfolding across the country? So I’ve been exploring how to address this abrupt disjuncture between the myth and the reality. What would it mean to reimagine the ‘timelessness’ of rural architecture, in relation to the glacial pace involved in the construction of a wood ant nest, for example, or the geological time inhabited by sandstone, the subterranean chronologies of fungi or the latent profile of a bronze age ring fort in a crop-mark. There’s a kind of eeriness in those confluences of temporal spaces that interests me, that seems to me to chime with the silent and invisible eviction of wildlife from the countryside - a spectral but ever present feature of any interaction with these landscapes in the current moment.

TS: Within your images, architectural forms are explored in relation to a somewhat hostile landscape, what drew you to southern England to make this work?

JD: I live, walk and photograph the landscape here, on the edge of the South Downs. My relationship to the place changed through walking it. I began enchanted by a landscape that superficially resembled a Samuel Palmer painting, and slowly became aware of the ancestral wealth, power and private property that are central to its history. The ways in which pasts inhabit the present moment in our experience of landscape, seem to me very pronounced here, in particular the fraught histories of enclosure and ecological destruction, or the obscene amounts of accumulated wealth that funded the building of parklands, the remnants of these practices are encoded in the land but exist alongside isolated pockets of profound beauty. There’s almost a conspiracy of silence around these facts, that manifests itself in notions of a Deep England, a kind of collective delusion - it’s this unsettling facade masking the tensions between nature and culture, and a compulsion to find some visual articulation of it, that has been the driving factor behind the work.

TS: Thatched cottages, relict machinery and churches seem a world away from the ecological crisis which is presented in mainstream media; global warming and single-use plastics for example. Can reframing our relationship with the planet in a more familiar and perhaps timeless setting provide a new way of thinking about ecological crisis?

JD: Yes, I think so, depending on what stories we tell. The architectural forms present in this work are products/cultural symbols of a social order that has been central to the configuration of the English rural landscape, but also to the consolidation of land and power that has estranged people from their own land and deprived them of meaningful experiences with nature. Richard Mabey speaks of the ideal relation to the more than human world as having ‘a sense of neighbourliness…based on sharing a place, on the common experience of home and habitat and season’. Climate is only one half of the story here - the ecological crisis which has seen 60% of the worlds wildlife destroyed since the 1970s has been enabled in part by its own invisibility, but surely also because we just haven’t cared, or had the knowledge to identify the ongoing destruction wrought on our own doorstep by soaking the countryside in chemicals, among other destructive practices. So it is important to reimagine the dominant narratives and myths that shape our relation to the countryside, to the local - you only have to look on Google maps at the closest area of undeveloped land to where you live and you’re likely to find the shadow of an old hedgerow ripped out.

TS: Specific species of trees, plants and fungi are photographed and identified throughout the series, do any have particular meaning to you personally, or within the context of your work?

JD: The organisms depicted are ones that confound, obscure and beguile in some way or another, characteristics at odds with those that our countryside has traditionally favoured; predictability, order, innocence. The early spider orchid, for example, is a mimic - it deceives a particular species of bee into attempting to mate with it, in order to spread its pollen.

TS: Do you have a prediction (or perhaps hope) for the future of the English countryside?

JD: This work comes from a place of unease, but I hope for better access, more community ownership of land, more land managed for nature rather than profit. This would be a good place to start.

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@james_r_dobson

Nadja Ellinger’s Path of Pins

April 12, 2021 Phoebe Somerfield

Nadja Ellinger is a visual artist interested in the oral tale as a way to explore new narratives offside the path. She was born in 1993 in a small medieval village in the middle of Germany. Spending most time in the forest and in books she fell in love with fairy tales, folklore and storytelling. After completing her bachelor’s degree in photography at the University of Applied Science in Munich, she studied for her MA in Photography at the Royal College of Art in London from 2018 to 2020.

Path of Pins is a visual re-telling of Little Red Riding Hood, revolving around adolescence and the fluidity of female representation in folklore.

In one of the earliest spoken versions of the fairytale, which later inspired Charles Perrault to write his ‘Petit Chaperon Rouge’, the wolf asks the unnamed heroine: “Which path will you take?”, to which she responds by choosing the path of pins, the careless and fleeting one – as opposed to the path of needles, the irreversible way of the wolf.

This decision of the pins reflect two interesting aspects: On a personal level, by refusing to follow the prescribed path, the heroine decides to stay a child and favours the state innumerable possibilities. Exploring what lies beyond, she leads us deep into the forest.

On an abstract level, this metaphor of pins and needles relates to how fairy tales are being treated: Like a butterfly collector, Perrault kills the living, ever-evolving oral tale, to present it to the reader in a pose he artificially forced upon it: He coerces the heroine into the corset of his ideologies. Compared to the early variants of the narrative, where the heroine tricks the wolf, Perrault reduces her to a naive girl guilty of her own violation.

The fairy tale questions authorship: Every form of retelling or reenactment embeds former versions of it, repeats it, alters it, so it will never be original – no authorship can be claimed over it. The fairy tale gives birth to itself.

Therefore I work with my friends, my family, my own body. It is a dreamlike state, where logic does not apply anymore and time works differently. The preconscious mind draws connections, develops a narrative I wasn’t aware of and finds analogies between this universe and reality, stitching these worlds together.

The tale develops, slowly, growing with each iteration, like a living creature.

Nadja’s work was exhibited and published in the UK, US, Italy, Germany, and France. She worked on commissions by clients such as Vogue USA and NR Magazine and held her first solo show with her project “But a Mermaid has not Tears'' in Munich, Germany. In 2020 she was one of the finalists for Camera Work in Ravenna, Italy, and exhibited at Voies-Off in Arles, the Ginnel Foto Festival, and the ‘Other Identity’ Biennal in Genova, among others.

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Evan Perkins on the Evangelical American Experience

February 6, 2021 Tom Skinner

Evan Perkins is a Boston-based artist. His photographs delve into acute explorations of the relationships between man-made structures and the altered natural world. He is highly influenced by the history of his upbringing along with matters of natural history, including botany, meteorology, and astronomy.

“The images in Grab Your Bibles, There’s a Storm Comin’, create a fictitious community, full of contradiction and paradox; used to invite a dissection of the white, evangelical, America that our systems of influence have continually granted an imbalance of power. It is an exploration of the ways in which groups conform to a prescribed set of moral beliefs and rituals in search for certainty in a world where the comforts of conviction seem forever out of reach”.

Interview by Tom Skinner

TS: This series is ongoing and has been created against the backdrop of Trump’s presidency. He is now the only president to have been impeached twice. Has your view of the project changed at all over the last few months?

EP: The issues that have come to the forefront of our societal consciousness through this presidency over the last four years have continually shifted the way I approach my work. If there was any benefit to his presidency, it was that the injustices that are too often glossed over have been brought to the forefront. It was the catalyst that America needed to take a deep look at not only at where we find ourselves now but also the generations of injustice that led to this point. For a majority of Americans, this restructuring of how we view our country’s history is deeply rooted in the privilege that not everyone bears the weight of injustice equally. While far too many have been aware of these issues for decades, I believe that there has been a wave of reflection that can hopefully set the tone for how we move forward as a country.

The images in Grab Your Bibles, There’s a Storm Comin’, create a fictitious community, full of contradiction and paradox; used to invite a dissection of the white, evangelical, America that our systems of influence have continually granted an imbalance of power. It is an exploration of the ways in which groups conform to a prescribed set of moral beliefs and rituals in search for certainty in a world where the comforts of conviction seem forever out of reach. One reason I’m drawn to continue making this work is that it’s able to constantly shift with the world that we’re living in. While the landscape created in the images isn’t held to a geographic specificity, it’s still inspired by the conflicts we have to wrestle with in America. I’m not interested in providing answers through the work but rather having it function as a way to continually ask questions that encourage a reconsideration of the biases and programming we’ve received as Americans, specifically through the context of white, evangelical America.

TS: Joe Biden tells Americans to not just keep the faith, but spread the faith. In relation to belief-based power dynamics, do you see the new presidency as being vastly different to the last?

EP: There’s a balance to the way we need to view this transition of power. On one hand, we’re able to rid ourselves of this parasitic entity that has continually and ruthlessly aimed to divide us with no regard for anyone’s wellbeing beyond his own. We also can’t become complacent and slowly shift into believing that all our problems as a nation are solved now that 45 is out of office. We should be skeptical of any leader or belief system that suggests that they are the only solution to their constituents’ problems.

That being said, the new tone set by the current administration is crucially important to the way in which we proceed as a country. They are by no means beyond criticism, but having new leadership that is proactively seeking to address the most important issues we face through the lens of providing relief for a country of people who are struggling is a step in the right direction. Now we have to keep them accountable to ensure that they not only fight for the promises they ran on but also encourage them to take bolder steps that reflect the ever deepening needs we have as a country.

TS: Photography lends itself well to examining memory and subconscious influence. Grab Your Bibles is based on a fictitious community, not dissimilar to the one you grew up in. What did you learn about yourself while making and editing the project?

EP: It took a while to put this together, but I slowly began to realize how intertwined our personal experiences are with seemingly disparate portions of our lives. For the last decade or so I had been reexamining the beliefs and programming that were handed down from the community I was raised, over time seeing that there was a dissonance between what I was told and what I had been experiencing in my own life and throughout the world adjacent to me. I saw this as something separate from my artistic practice and didn’t think it would be something I would incorporate into my work. But as I continued to photograph, I consistently found these themes resurfacing in the images I was making and the landscape I was drawn towards.

I was photographing scenes in flux that perpetually contradicted themselves. I was interested in the dissonance of facade and perception and the ways in which we often ignore the messiness of our own experiences while presenting a more polished version of ourselves to the world. This led to a further exploration of our cultural obsession with certainty and how both American and evangelical values deeply rely on maintaining the status quos they’ve erected. I began to include text and iconography I was familiar with growing up in an evangelical rural/suburban community in America and began to pair it with a frenetic and anxious energy that I was discovering and photographing in the landscapes, people, and animals that reveal themselves in these images.

TS: There are four images of animals in the series; two of birds, one of a dog and a rabbit. The images are full of unease, the animals appear to be trying to escape. What role do they play in the project?

EP: To not run the risk of being illustrative, I wanted to include images in the work that were heavily connected to ideas of myth and metaphor. I’m fascinated by the ways in which animals have an almost paranormal characteristic of being able to predict oncoming storms and other natural phenomena, and I used this energy to create a sense of tension in the work. For me, the title Grab Your Bibles, There’s a Storm Comin’, ties the various aspects of the work together, referencing the epic Biblical stories that I was raised with and the rich metaphors they contain. It focuses on how we crave certainty and turn to predetermined and comfort-based thinking in the face of confrontation as well as repurposing the ways where in the Bible, storms were used to metaphorically represent divine reckoning and cultural turning points.

TS: What are your hopes for America's future?

EP: I’m finding it hard to provide an answer that doesn’t seem contrived or cheesy as hell haha! But I’ll give it a try. American culture doesn’t often lend itself to subtlety and nuance. We’re drawn to tradition, excess, and certainty. I hope that we can become more willing to adopt non dual thinking, allowing space to consider upbringings and experiences different from our own as valid in order to empathetically live with those around us. If we were able to have more honest conversations and not allow those in power to reductively blame, scapegoat, and divide us, we give ourselves the opportunity to see the humanity in each other, and I believe that would dramatically change the way we function as a country.

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Navigating the Subconscious, in Conversation with Foam Talent Simon Lehner

February 3, 2021 Frederik Marks

Simon Lehner (b.1996) is a lens-based artist and photographer currently working and living in Vienna. He graduated from the University of Applied Arts Vienna in 2020 and has been involved in several competitions such as Paris-Photo Carte Blanche award (2018) and Red Hook Labs New Artists (2019). Despite being a student at the time he has already given his first lecture at Bauhaus University. Simon Lehner was recently selected as a Foam Talent 2021 along with 20 others published in the latest edition. He will have a solo show at the Fotohof Salzburg this year. In his work Simon discusses notions of masculinity. How Far is a Lightyear deals with notions of trauma, memory and identity formed through family.

The boy in Simon’s series is similar to Hunter, the main character of Wim Wenders Paris, Texas (1984) who was the subject of a troubling childhood. Hunter was separated from his parents when he turned two. They both disappeared and so he grew up with his aunt and uncle. Together they formed a picture-perfect family in the Los Angeles suburbs. Some five years later the father returns from the Mojave Desert. At first Hunter is not willing to accept the long-lost father as his parent. He can only really accept Travis as his father once they watch an old Super8 film recorded when Hunter was 2 years old, depicting Hunter, his mother and Travis on holiday. When Hunter and Travis go on a quest to find the mother in Houston, Hunter explains to Travis how the universe once was whole. At some point it all exploded and all of the universe’s components scattered all over the place, colliding, forming new planets and suns. Hunter’s childhood was obstructed when his parents left. Later on, he describes how if a man puts a baby down, travelled at the speed of light for only one hour and returned, the baby would have turned into an old man. Hunter’s words sound innocent, yet they carry the heavy burden of being abandoned; his parents disappearance left a gap in his life so huge it felt unimaginable to ever close it. He describes the memories of his mother as a movie character in a galaxy far far away. Yet, he also always knew that his father was walking and talking somewhere out there in the vast universe. Hunter has hope of reunification. He is obsessed with space crafts and is determined to close the gap, to find his mother, to travel to Houston at light speed in merely 3 seconds.

The little boy in Simon’s work is an autobiographical character that has some similarities with Hunter; both have an affinity for expressing their heavy burdens through metaphors in terminology surrounding space travel.

‘How far is a lightyear’? is the first question the little boy asked his father when they first met. Unlike Hunter, he has no hope, he cannot reunify with the absent father. He is left with a wound too big for any child’s imagination to close. Drawings, renderings of found photos and sketches outline atrocities, trauma and most of all absence. Simon’s photographs are joyful memorabilia from his childhood. They are soaked in nostalgia. Yet, despite their playfulness, they document a boy at the verge of chaos, in the firing line of a love story gone wrong. The playing cards, depicting a queen on top and a king lying flat in the shadow, are balanced for this moment in time, but something will happen. Soon the boy will twitch his eye muscle and both father and mother will fall into an abyss, dragging him down with them and all that remains for us viewers is to repeat a silent mantra: so far so good, so far so good. The tiniest movement will make the Jenga tower collapse, burying the boy beneath it. He is trying to appear strong, ants crawling up his back, no sting too painful to give up. Nothing can shatter him but the tiniest amount of wind blowing through his hair, leaving him devastated in his bed, unable to move.

Simon uses the medium of photography with purpose. In no other medium could he create the same paranoia of an impending imbalance; the little boy manoeuvres through his childhood in joy and play, always balancing, yet also always at the verge of losing control. Through sketches, renderings, archival imagery and photography Simon manages to outline the ineffable.

Writing and interview by Frederik Marks (translated from conversation in German).

FM: Congratulations on your nomination as a Foam Talent 2021! How does it feel to be nominated? I remember that especially at the beginning of my studies the likes of David de Beyter and Daniel Shea were huge inspirations. They were the photographers I really looked up to. Do you share the same kind of admiration for the previous Foam Talents?

SL: The first time I encountered Foam was probably around 5 years ago. At that time Thomas Albdorf was an assistant in my course at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. He introduced us to all of the previous Foam talents. That definitely opened my eyes to new ways of photographing. Contemporary approaches to photography were not really taught at my university at the time. I realized that I definitely want to be involved with Foam at some point in my career. I was a runner up last year and now this year I finally made it into the Foam Talent shortlist. It is true, many of the photographers previously nominated for Foam were huge inspirations for me as well 5 years ago, I imagined what my life would be like if I ever became one. It is still strange for me because I really looked up to these people, and suddenly you get the message you are a Foam Talent, but it still feels very unreal to me to be part of a group of people that were my role models.

FM: How did you experience your time at university as a whole?

SL: I was studying for the last five years. I think that most of my time at university was about personal development and not always about learning new photographic and other lens-based skills that are essential to my practice now. For example, everything relating 3d modelling and rendering is self-taught. Yet, nonetheless I believe that this personal development and also the people I met at university were crucial in my development as a photographer also.

FM: I can very much relate that university did not necessarily teach me skills that blur photography with other media like painting and 3D modelling / rendering. How if not through Uni did you come in contact with mixing photography with lens-based art done with the likes of Blendr?

SL: I first got interested in renderings when I learned that ad campaigns by Mercedes are now almost entirely rendered. I really like the idea that at this moment in time our perception of what is photography is expanded subconsciously. I really like to play at the border of what is perceived as photography and what is perceived as render.

FM: When I had a look at your early photographic work it appears like classical German/ Austrian documentary photography. In Men Don’t Play it is the first time that you start to mix classical documentary work with 3D renderings. I think it is fascinating to see your work expand and include more work that is non photographic. It feels as though you can increasingly bring lens-based renderings and photography to the same visual language, which I think is really hard to achieve. Especially with archive material in contemporary photography this same visual language seems to be absent and some archival images seem like gimmicks that support the message of the photographs without really communicating within the same visual language. Coming back to ‘How far is a light year’: I feel as if you use the medium of photography in this series for a precise reason: to show balance at the verge of collapse. I’ve read in a previous interview that the image with the boy balancing two playing cards has an autobiographic background. Therefore, I’d like to ask how you came up with that specific image.

SL: Most of the time my work is autobiographic. The balance of queen and king therefore represents my parents but simultaneously universal power struggles. The boy is me as a ten-year-old. I am trying to balance my way through life. The photographs are set in a domestic situation that allows for room of interpretation. All images in themselves represent accidental and every-day childhood memories. That way they are joyous and innocent and only in the context of the series, they could hold hints of power struggles, trauma and impending imbalance. I did not really know my father and I am trying to make him tangible in archive images and renderings.

FM: It seems as if the images show that the child is handling a stress test which will determine his future. Is this also the link to the photographs of the Jenga tower?

SL: Yes precisely. As children we are so fragile and every way in which we encounter the world and the way we are influenced by people in it can tip the development of a child in either or direction. The same idea applies for the photograph of stem cells: If stem cells are influenced in the stadium that I photographed them you could influence them in a way that will determine what they eventually grow into..

FM: Are the photographs of the stem cells archive material?

SL: No, I actually managed to take a picture with an electron microscope at the lab for stem cell research in Vienna.

FM: When did you realize that you wanted to release this project to the public, that you are not just creating it for yourself, but to make it accessible to a greater audience?

SL: Subconsciously I have always worked in the fields of masculine domains. At first, I was photographing MMA fighters and boxers, then I did a series on hunters and similarly in my project Men don’t play, which was about soldiers. I think that throughout the years I have continuously questioned why I am seeking out those kinds of subjects. I came to the realization that I am actually dealing with the issues discussed in How far is a lightyear?. It is likely that all of my previous projects were circling around my relationship with my father or lack there off. I was hesitant to make this series public and at first, I started it with the intention to keep it private, but I have realised that the longing for an absent person in your life is such a universal experience. I thought that my series might at least start a visual dialogue. I only really noticed that it worked when I exhibited the series as part of Paris Photo. Some people came up to me and explained that they know this kind of tension that I tried to capture. Without actually discussing the individual trauma it created a bond in empathy which was really moving.

FM: I have realised for myself that there is an overarching theme in my work as well. As soon as I realised what it was, I was first excited that I’d have broken the cycle, yet every time I start a new series, I end up coming back to the same issues in an abstracted form. Have you experienced a similar abstraction after working on How Far is a Lightyear?

SL: Yes absolutely, when I started the video work for my new series The mind is a voice, the voice is blind I thought I was creating work that was unrelated to my previous work, yet once again it is connected. I actually think it is a beautiful thing. Especially when you can see the progression of the same idea over and over again in another photographer’s work.

FM: When I saw the image of the boy that has ants crawling around his body, I first saw bees. Why did you choose the ants and what do they represent?

SL: The ants are another childhood reference. Because my father was absent, I always felt inclined to present myself as a strong man. I did not miss out any dares in order to receive recognition. The ants are a kind of dare and the boy poses to prove courage. The ants have a sensory, bodily response on the viewer. It feels like an uncomfortable electricity. The same kind of uncomfortable tingle that I felt whenever I was in the presence of my father. Therefore, the boy tries to show a masculine facade admits this rush of uneasiness.

FM: Shortly after presenting your series at Paris you were commissioned to shoot an editorial for Vogue. How did that happen, and do you enjoy doing commissioned work just as much as personal work?

SL: When I showed ‘How far is a lightyear’ in New York in 2019, the US Vogue approached me and asked whether I think I could adapt my visual language to a fashion editorial. They were specifically looking at the pose of the boy with ants on his back. I was completely paralised at first because I had not really work in fashion before. As long as I can carry over a personal concept into the commission, I really enjoy doing it. If it is only about the surface where concept and story is irrelevant, I don’t really like it as much. As long as I can bring a concept into it, whether acknowledged by the client or not, I really enjoy doing commissions. For example, when I did a series for a champagne brand, I was able to work completely freely and was able to bring in personal concepts that made the whole project exciting for me.

FM: Thank you so much for taking the time to have a chat with me. As a last question I’d like to ask where you see yourself in ten years?

SL: No problem at all. I really enjoy doing interviews. Hopefully I’ll have gallery representation by that point. My absolute dream however is a solo show in America or Germany or generally a big solo show. For my future I hope to still have the freedom to work in photography. That privilege, to be able to work creatively, keeps me going. I am excited to see all of the new technologies that will emerge within ten years – the ever-blurring line between lens-based and computer images and how I can push photography into new realms in the hopes to find a completely unfamiliar visual language.

Simon Lehner juxtaposes How far is a lightyear with his new series The Mind is a Voice, the Voice is Blind for the new Foam Talent issue.

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Chanel Irvine Captures the Simple Joys of Another English Summer

January 27, 2021 Tom Skinner

Chanel Irvine is a London based documentary photographer, her personal work reflects the tension between preservation and change. With an eye for moments she deems timeless, her observations consistently focus on scenes that are reminiscent of older, simpler times which persist despite the advancements that otherwise transform the world we live in. As a result, her photographs accentuate the ‘ordinary’ - reasserting its importance as a photographic subject and highlighting the beauty that can constantly be rediscovered in the everyday.

Her stories often focus on livelihoods, environments and communities that are susceptible to change based on emerging trends, development demands and the technological progressions that inevitably accompany today’s increasingly modern society. Aware of the multitude of sustainability issues they face, she is particularly interested in the people and organisations who are working to make a positive environmental and social impact in their communities.

Another English Summer explores the summer of 2020, when England was emerging from the first Covid-19 national lockdown. Chanel documented her own travels throughout England, from Kent to Devon, Cornwall to Shropshire, drawn to the quintessential and the nostalgic; traditions, joys and sights seemingly unafeccted by the global pandemic.

“The warmer, unseasonably pleasant weather during the early lockdown months granted people the ability to enjoy long walks and rediscover the simple joys of a picnic or time spent in one’s garden. Then, when travel restrictions eased, Brits recognised the true value of a ‘staycation’, and all matter of adventures they could have without stepping foot on an airplane”.

Interview by Tom Skinner

TS: Before completing your MA in Photography, you studied Politics, Philosophy and Economics at the Australian National University, how has that education informed your approach to photography?

CI: I studied PPE because I was, and still am, incredibly passionate about people and interested in the different issues they face and combat – across all levels of society. I wanted to have an informed and balanced understanding of the socio-political, economic and philosophical forces that drive them. My degree has made me a meticulous researcher, and I believe stories are always paramount to visuals. Because of this, I always work to ensure my photographs honestly reflect the experiences and history of the people and places I photograph. To date, the best way I have found to do this is to talk to those I meet and who feature in my images, so that I can do the scene justice by capturing a genuine, lived experience within the frame. Of course, it is near impossible for a photographer not to impose any of his or her own perspective, feelings or interpretation onto an image... we do compose the shot after all. Because of this, I am hoping to focus my work on fewer, longer-term projects; granting me the ability to conduct far more research and develop a more in-depth understanding and relationship with those I photograph.

TS: Your work appears to draw on the rich history of documentary photography and riffs on the large format motifs pioneered by American colour photographers such as Joel Sternfeld and Alec Soth, where do you draw inspiration from?

CI: I certainly look to the pioneers of documentary photography (their names too many to list here), predominantly because I have an intense fascination with all things timeless, or reminiscent of older, simpler times. I think my eyes have become trained to look for scenes that are reflective of what Shirley Baker or Tom Wood might have photographed... scenes of a time gone-by, which, nevertheless, persist in a country so deeply protective of tradition, custom and identity as England. The large-format images of Simon Roberts have certainly inspired my photography as well. If, however, there is one photographer whose work I look to with the most admiration (and the hope that I might one day be able to achieve something similar), it would be Sheron Rupp, and the images in her book ‘Taken From Memory.’

TS: Another English Summer explores the time in England following the initial lockdown. With hindsight it feels a long time ago, and potentially a long time until the current lockdown ends. What were the conversations like with the people you met while making the project?

CI: I couldn’t agree with you more; I doubt any of us imagined that we’d soon return to a lockdown more indefinite and concerning than the first. During that summer, however, the people I photographed were all so elated by the small and seemingly-luxurious joys the summer months afforded them. I encountered a widespread, collective sense of gratitude, and whilst people referred to the lockdown months, they were all focused on what the ongoing pandemic didn’t take away from them. I believe these lockdowns - by restricting what we can do and taking away the ability to host customers in your store or café, to go to a friend’s house for a cup of tea, or travel to visit one’s parents – has instilled within the majority of us a heightened awareness of what we can still do. And so, when those summer months and freedom of travel finally arrived, people were overjoyed by rediscovered possibilities, and less-focused on the otherwise-disheartening restrictions.

TS: How has your view of the work you made during the summer changed, and what are your hopes for the future?

CI: Of course, now it seems like only a fleeting moment in time, as we have since retreated into yet another indefinite and broadly-discouraging lockdown. Perhaps, had I been more realistic about the fact that the joys of the summer months (and not just those dependent on the sunny weather) would inevitably be taken away again – the roadtrips, the daytrips, the picnics and re-opened pubs – I might have focused my questions on how people felt about returning to lockdown again. However, like my subjects, I was too blissfully distracted by our newfound sense of freedom to even imagine losing it again. In saying this, I think the photos adequately represent how the nation jumped to its feet with enthusiasm and optimism when it was within reach, and I don’t doubt it will again – whenever we eventually conquer this persistent and devastating virus. I have since taken a break from photographing life during the pandemic, I think I need to take a step away from it – maybe just to help shift my own focus away from the virus – and I am currently planning potential projects that I might be able to commence when this is all over...

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