Then There Was Us

What fascinates you about the people and places you document?

I’m not sure exactly, but often in my day-to-day life, what’s in front of me suddenly feels surreal and cinematic. It could be triggered by the way a person dresses or the way they move through their environment, a ray of light reflecting off someone’s hair, or something as simple as the geometry of a brick wall. It’s as though a number of elements have suddenly aligned and the atmosphere feels ‘charged’. When I see it I get a rush of excitement and I know I have to try and capture it. Most of the time it doesn’t work out, but that’s what I’m always chasing. 

The people I photograph often aren’t the ones that draw a lot of attention to themselves. I recently went to visit a friend in Tokyo who observed me taking a lot of photos over the course of a week, and she described the people I’m drawn to as the ‘beta characters’ or the ‘supporting actors’. If I approach a group of lads, it’s usually one of the quiet ones, not the ‘alpha male’ that I’m interested in. I think there’s a certain understated charisma that I notice. This isn’t really a conscious decision though, and I wasn’t aware of this until my friend pointed it out to me. 

With the rise of technology and social media, it feels like our presence in the world is becoming more dispersed and harder to define. Have you noticed this in your own experiences, and how does it influence what you aim to capture when creating an image?

Oh, absolutely. I’m definitely addicted to checking my phone and social media, and I can feel it getting worse as time goes on. I’m trying different methods to try to help me stay present in my surroundings, like meditating every day, and reading before I go to bed rather than looking at my phone. But I know deep down that stuff like this only has a limited effect. I don’t think becoming a luddite and navigating the world with a Nokia 3310 is the answer, so I know I just need to set myself very strict boundaries with tech and stick to them. 

It’s hard to say how this might be affecting my photography, because, over the years my photography has improved through continual practice, whilst my addiction to tech has gotten worse. So I don’t really have a former self I can compare myself to. However, years ago I used to spend a lot more time walking around taking photos, just for the sake of it, often for 8 hours or more at a time, whereas I don’t really do that any more, and it’s just a part of my daily routine now. I’m not really sure if that’s a result of a diminished attention span, or if I’m just generally busier and have more responsibilities. 

I think there’s no doubt that smartphones and social media limit our ability to be present in our surroundings and hence make images, but I think they also affect deeper, more conceptual thinking too - the ability to make connections between abstract concepts and pull them together. I definitely feel like my thoughts have become more fractured and sporadic over the last few years, probably as a result of doom scrolling. And my time spent walking around, taking photos for hours was often where I’d do a lot of my deepest thinking, so I must try and reclaim that for myself and get off my bloody phone…

The body of work I first came across was the Ravers series. This presumably involved a lot of late nights, but tell me why this was important to document for you?

I’ve always loved going to illegal raves. I love the appropriation of disused spaces as temples of self-expression and debauchery, and the subversiveness of bringing people together to dance without turning a profit. When I’ve previously mentioned free parties to friends who aren’t involved in the scene, sometimes they respond with surprise that illegal raves still exist in London. I guess I just wanted to show people that it’s still a thriving culture despite the slow creep of neoliberal cultural erosion.

I also wanted to show this culture in a way that wasn’t too revealing, which is why I decided to take portraits of people outside the rave, rather than photographing the parties themselves. This invites the viewer to try to fill in the gaps about where the subjects might have been by taking hints from their clothing and their surroundings. I like the quiet, softness of capturing people in a state of semi-exhaustion after leaving a rave at sunrise. Emerging from a dark, sweaty cavern into the morning light marks an interesting point of transition when the real world starts to creep back into your awareness, and the euphoria begins to fade. I think it’s a really beautiful time to take someone’s portrait.

One of the big effects of neoliberalism is the dissolving of community and the promotion of individualism. Think of Maragret Thatcher’s quote “there’s no such thing as society, there are individual men and women and there are families.” This aligns with the neoliberal project’s worship of capital and turning public spaces into private property.

You’ve mentioned the slow creep of neoliberal cultural erosion, but it feels like this shift has been accelerating for a while now. Projects like THEN THERE WAS US are finding it increasingly challenging to survive, and many successful publications are shutting down. The DIY scene—whether in music or other creative fields—is becoming harder to access, with independent venues closing left and right. How do you interpret these changes? What strategies do you think creatives can adopt to navigate this landscape? And what do you think the future of independent culture should look like?

That’s an absolutely huge question but I’ll do my best to answer it. Let’s start with the immediate, short-term. First of all, I think we should be making a big effort to foster community. One of the big effects of neoliberalism is the dissolving of community and the promotion of individualism. Think of Maragret Thatcher’s quote “there’s no such thing as society, there are individual men and women and there are families.” This aligns with the neoliberal project’s worship of capital and turning public spaces into private property. As I write this, I’m back in my hometown in Northern Ireland, and earlier I walked past a pub/music venue that I used to frequent as a teenager being turned into a block of luxury flats. This was a space that fostered a community that is now becoming a closed-off, private space for rich people to use, probably as a second home, or as just a piece of investment. I think we need to be aware and stay alert to the ways that individualism is being forced upon us, and try to resist them. Think about how most of us turn to Netflix now as a form of relaxation in the evening. Sitting alone in our rooms watching a laptop screen, with an infinite library to choose from, rather than going to a cinema and potentially meeting people who have similar interests to us. This is easier said than done of course, because as we’re pushed into working harder and for longer to make rent, exhaustion and burn-out makes it increasingly difficult to find the time and energy to organise and build community. 

Thinking about the photography industry in particular, I think we need to question the traditional, capitalist markers of success, like what brands you’ve shot for and who your client list is, and think about how we can use our creativity to imagine a better future and to build communities, rather than just help brands sell products. Of course, we live under capitalism and doing these jobs is necessary for our survival, but I think we should be wary about who we’re shooting for, and how providing them with a cool image is benefiting them, and what it might be masking. 

In terms of how I think the future should look, it’s become quite obvious in the past decade that  traditional power structures are slowly beginning to crumble, and our leaders have become pretty toothless in making any real change happen in the face of an increasingly powerful billionaire class, climate catastrophe and brutal genocide. I’d like to see a future that does away with political leaders, or at least one with much smaller governments, where decisions are made by people’s assemblies, so we actually have control over our living environments and how their infrastructure is managed. I’d like to see corporations be replaced with co-ops, where workers can make decisions about what goods and services they provide, rather than one powerful person at the top making all the big decisions. This is a future that would place more value on jobs that lead to a betterment of society like care work and teaching, and promote skillful artisanship rather than uniform mass production. If we can abandon growth economics and the production of needless products and services for the purpose of raising capital and growing the economy, work hours will go down, and people will have more time to spend on things like childcare, creativity and community. This would create a more steady-state economy that doesn’t endlessly exploit the earth’s resources and retunes the balance between human consumption and the limits of the natural world. I just finished reading a book called ‘Slow Down’ by Kohei Saito that discusses all of this stuff, so give it a read if this kind of stuff interests you.

What do you want to achieve with your work long term?

To be honest, I don’t really think about the long-term in my work that much, but I suppose I have always been fascinated by what culture looks and feels like right now, and where it’s going. In the future, what cultural references will people think of when they look back at this time period? What are the defining features of now? And what will those future people look like? What clothes will they be wearing? What music will they be listening to? These are questions that have always intrigued me since I was a child living through the turn of the millennium. So when I’m taking portraits, I’m more drawn to the group of teenagers with multi-coloured hair than to the old man wearing a bowler hat. Young people are at the razor sharp edge of a culture constantly in flux. To me, they’re the best representation of culture today, and a hint of what it will become. I suppose I’d like to have a body of work that really captures the ‘grain’ of the 2020s and beyond. It feels exciting to me that it might be part of a larger conversation about what it was like to be alive now.

There’s another feeling I experience from time to time, which I can only describe as ‘cosmic shock.’ When I’m pacing my way down a street with my eyes to the pavement, probably stressing about a piece of work I need to finish, and then I remember that gravity is holding me onto the surface of a rocky sphere, hurtling through the cosmos at tens of thousands of miles per hour, in an expanding universe made up of supermassive black holes and galaxy filaments. Suddenly all the things I spend 99% of my day thinking about start to feel absurd. Everything does. In the future I’d love to make work that channels this feeling. The absurd simultaneity of a cornershop and a cloud of interstellar dust. A night bus and a supernova. I don’t know how this would work but perhaps one day I’ll give it a go. 

Since the rise of the internet, everything seems to be converging in the same direction—perhaps a reflection of how neoliberalism, as you mentioned earlier, erodes cultural diversity. In this landscape, what forms the foundation of a truly original idea or story?

I think first of all, it’s important to note that as social creatures, we always copy each other to some degree. Innovations in art always come from a group of people or a ‘scene’, and not from one genius or enlightened individual. This backs up my previous point about fostering creative communities and rejecting the individualism-on-steroids forced upon us by Neoliberalism. However, I’ve often noticed the importance of ‘incubators’ when it comes to creativity too. If you look at the roots of something like jungle for example, this was a completely novel, absolutely groundbreaking genre of music, synthesised and formed out of the ether as a result of young, working-class people coming together at house parties, warehouse raves and small nightclubs in London, playing and making music together. Of course, they had outside influences from Jamaican dub, US hip-hop and house and UK hardcore, but this was much more drip-fed and organic than the constant and fragmented barrage of stimuli that people get through their phones and laptops today. They didn’t have analytics departments in record labels trying to tell them what sells and what young people want to hear, they were just fucking around and experimenting with the tools that were available to them, and the feedback they got was the crowd’s reaction at the parties they played at.

The persistent and continuous feedback that we get from posting to social media, the hyper-connectivity of people at all corners of the globe, and our ability to instantly access the nostalgic comfort of the past through YouTube etc, has massively stymied the incubation that allows new ideas to proliferate. This, plus my aforementioned point of having every spare moment being filled with constant stimuli from our phones, stops us from being in the present, and from drawing together abstract concepts and coming up with new ideas. When I listen to a track like ‘Gorgon Sound’ by Horsepower Productions, it sounds so firmly rooted in its time and place. The whooshing synths and the syncopated drums sound like London at night, constantly on the move and bubbling with energy. You can tell it was made by people who were present in their surroundings and were very locked in to the details of that time. I know I’m talking a lot about music here, but I think it can be extrapolated to include all forms of creativity, and especially photography, as photography is a way of making art from our immediate surroundings. In summary, I think that original ideas come from strong communities that don’t rely on brands, corporations or institutions giving them recognition. They come from people who allow themselves to have mental solitude, and are aware of what’s going on around them in both a visceral and a political sense. As DJ Hype once said “Fuck what the industry says, it’s out the back of a car, and it’s real.”

Would you say your work is influenced by anything in particular?

Films have definitely influenced my work and the way I see things. ‘Chungking Express’ by Wong Kar Wai is one that springs to mind, also ‘Tangerine’ by Sean Baker, ‘Good kid, m.A.A.d city’ by Khalil Joseph, anything by Gaspar Noé. I love the simplicity of ‘Lift’ by Marc Issacs too. It’s a really straightforward idea that delivers such a rich, multi-layered narrative about the human condition in the short space of 20 minutes.

In terms of photographers, Khalik Allah is a big influence, along with Diane Arbus, Jim Goldberg, Vanessa Winship, William Eggleston, Davide Sorrenti, Richard Renaldi, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Gregory Halpern, Megan Doherty, the list could go on! 

I went to see the ‘When Forms Come Alive’ exhibition at the Hayward gallery earlier this year, and there was a sculpture by an artist called Franz West that really grabbed me. It was called ‘Cain and Abel’ and it was composed of two comedic, abstract  forms that looked as though they could have been engaged in combat. To me, it suggested a narrative that lives outside of language, a story that’s symbolic and subconscious, ancient and timeless, that persists throughout humanity in many forms. It gave me a really deep and indescribable feeling and made me think a lot about the role of art in filling in the gaps where words fail. I’d love to try and get closer to this in my own work, somehow, in time.