The Places We Make

Steveston Fisherman’s Wharf and Kyle’s Café

“Places shape the people who live and work in them, and people shape the places in return. I’m interested in how people adapt to their surroundings, and how these changes become part of a place”

I was born in Brighton and spent several years living in Canada before returning to the UK. Moving between both places has become part of the way I understand and make work. I have always been intrested in places where people have found ways to survive and create lives through industry, trade, food and land. Photography has become the way I connect with these places, and in doing so, a way of making a ‘place’ for myself.

This is where my own feedback loop begins: I respond to places that have themselves been shaped by people responding to their surroundings. Through photography, I make my own connection to them, and that experience feeds back into how I see and understand place.

Both works use food as a way of looking at these relationships. At Steveston Fisherman’s Wharf, a waterfront whose identity was built around fishing and has since evolved alongside tourism, redevelopment, and changing forms of public consumption, the photographs consider the shifting position of the fisherman within this changing landscape. Through layered and obstructed views, the work explores the relationship between image and labour: what is visible, what is hidden, and how working life can become only partially visible through the act of seeing.

At Kyle’s Café on Commercial Drive, a Chinese run diner serves both Chinese dishes and English style breakfasts. The combination of foods forms a shared economic system, shaped by the diversity of the neighbourhood and the need to meet different customers throughout the day. Rather than simply representing cultural hybridity, the menu reflects adaptation as a form of economic survival; a way of making a viable place by responding to the people around it.

The Feedback Loop extends beyond the subjects of the photographs to my own position as an image maker. These are places that have been shaped by people responding to their environments; I am then responding to these places through my own way of seeing; which, in turn, is my own way of finding my way through new terrain.