An Expatriate's Views
An emigrant is never quite at home. In the adopted country this is self-evident, but it is also the case in the country of origin. When I return ‘home’ from the United States, England seems familiar and distant, comfortable and claustrophobic, welcoming and disturbing. Old ideas of class, accent, education, region, nationality, and ethnicity now sit badly. Brexit has brought xenophobia to the foreground.
On repeated visits I have looked for images that resonate with my conflicted responses to attitudes I cannot entirely shed and to exclusions that are partly self-inflicted. The photographs are from rural and small-town locations and emulate the formal tools of traditional black-and-white landscape photography. These methods acknowledge the nostalgia and sense of history which are integral to British self-perception and that have been exploited by those leading the country away from the EU and into a hazardous and uncertain future.