An Expatriate's Views Of England
Englishness is clubby and at the same time a set of rigorous divisions and exclusions: class, accent, education, family, region, nationality, ethnicity... In early life all this seemed natural. As the expatriate son of a Jewish father and an English mother I now find I belong to neither Englishness nor Jewishness. Visiting, England seems familiar and distant, comfortable and claustrophobic, welcoming and awful.
After one such trip “home,” I looked through my photographs and found particular images held more for me than the conscious reasons for which I had taken them: pictures of walls, fences, and enclosed and formal gardens. On a subsequent visit I looked for more.
The photographs use the formal rigor and traditional tools of a landscape photographer – black-and-white film, a large-format view camera, and 16”x20” hand-made prints. These methods are used ironically; the purpose is not to admire or enshrine the English landscape. The images flow in part from the history that has shaped the land and the conditions that maintain it. Principally, however, they represent my reactions to attitudes I cannot entirely escape and to exclusions that are partly self-inflicted.
2005 and 2007, perhaps more in 2011.
Silver-gelatin prints, image size about 16" by 20".