'Searching for your Shadow'
a photobook publishing in March 2021
‘Searching for your Shadow’ is a self-published photobook exploring memory, history and urban geography.
Like my birth and adoptive parents, I am a migrant with links to Ireland, Poland, and France, as well as my home country, Britain. My (adoptive) mother was also the child of migrants, from Poland. She was not born in Paris, but, was always from Paris.
This photobook consists of an exploration of my Parisian mother’s home district (the 15th arrondissement). This is one of the most everyday areas in Paris, with little there to attract the tourist or the sightseer.
These are also the streets I trod when I spent a week in Paris in 1967, aged 15. I spent a week walking, visiting galleries, observing, and absorbing. I did not have a camera at that time, but I now understand that that week was pivotal to my visual education. I learnt to not passively look, but to actively see.
Later in life I became a photographer.
This project is heavily influenced by the writings of Patrick Modiano (Nobel Prize for Literature, 2014), whose writings are the fragmented, lateral stories of memories, history, and the urban geography of Paris.
Crucially, Modiano's characters usually attempt, and fail, to make some sense of memories of the past. This failure is implicit in their search, as it is in mine.
The fragility of memory is thrown into relief by my mother’s struggles with dementia in the latter years of her life.
This slippage of personal and familial memory greatly informed this search for the intangible.
Below is a slideshow of the sequence of the photographs in the book:
Like my birth and adoptive parents, I am a migrant with links to Ireland, Poland, and France, as well as my home country, Britain. My (adoptive) mother was also the child of migrants, from Poland. She was not born in Paris, but, was always from Paris.
This photobook consists of an exploration of my Parisian mother’s home district (the 15th arrondissement). This is one of the most everyday areas in Paris, with little there to attract the tourist or the sightseer.
These are also the streets I trod when I spent a week in Paris in 1967, aged 15. I spent a week walking, visiting galleries, observing, and absorbing. I did not have a camera at that time, but I now understand that that week was pivotal to my visual education. I learnt to not passively look, but to actively see.
Later in life I became a photographer.
This project is heavily influenced by the writings of Patrick Modiano (Nobel Prize for Literature, 2014), whose writings are the fragmented, lateral stories of memories, history, and the urban geography of Paris.
Crucially, Modiano's characters usually attempt, and fail, to make some sense of memories of the past. This failure is implicit in their search, as it is in mine.
The fragility of memory is thrown into relief by my mother’s struggles with dementia in the latter years of her life.
This slippage of personal and familial memory greatly informed this search for the intangible.
Below is a slideshow of the sequence of the photographs in the book:
As well as the above images, the book also contains maps of the 15th arrondissement, two of my mother's identity cards from the 1940s, an epigraph (by Patrick Modiano), a dedication to my mother, and an Afterword discussing the influences, the development, and realisation of the project.
As a result of a successful Kickstarter campaign at the end of 2020, I am able to produce a limited edition of 200 hardback copies of the book, which is dedicated to the memory of my mother. All copies are numbered and signed. This is still on track to be published in March 2021.
Exhibition
An exhibition designed to sit alongside the publication of 'Searching for your Shadow', was planned to be held at Centrespace Gallery at the end of March. While I'm still printing for this date, I'm looking at the very real possibility of exhibiting at a later date. Watch this space!
