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For years I have wanted to take photos of my hometown. The places I knew so well, the street where I lived, the views from my windows. The library I used as a child and not enough as an adult.
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But these places have changed while I took too long to finally photograph them, so that everything is different from what I once saw. The chestnut tree, once standing outside my bedroom window was cut down long ago, just a few months after I had left. One of a whole row of trees that used to line our street.
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New neighbours have moved in on either side of the house. Families with children and names I’ve never heard, unfamiliar sounds that don’t quite add up
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When I leave the house, a part of me is equally curious, equally dreading to see if I will meet someone I once knew and of having to talk to them, to be caught out with how different I am, my new strange accent catching me out. Those high English A’s and the way I take too long to find the right words.
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I don’t know if I feel like one of them anymore, if I belong here, or some other place across the North Sea. Yet when I come back and come home, at least to this house, that’s what it feels like. It’s like shedding a thick, heavy coat that has restricted my movements all these months through winter. The ease with which I can move around.
All these years, the bus times have never changed.
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But then I finally try to take the photos that have been in my mind for so long, trying to capture the things I remember in these new images that don’t quite look the same. And when I come back to England with my two exposed rolls, when I develop them in my bathroom and hang them up to dry, what I see is all these images looking like ghosts.
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These things and places, part of a different life I have wanted to record for so long, they have escaped me. As if even in my photographs of them, I am not able to hold on, they are nothing more than apparitions now, images not quite there.
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This piece was inspired by the photographs and my attempts to try and photograph my hometown.
The photographs were an experiment with a film type, which was new to me and not only do I not like the look of the film but something also went wrong when they got developed.
I wanted to show them anyway, these happy accidents I’m slowly coming to like and when I was looking at them again just now while going through some recent drafts, I suddenly saw how fitting that ghostly appearance is to the subject, as I seem destined to keep failing to photograph this place.
And so this piece of writing came out of them instead.
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