Above Us The Day

Every child has dreamt of becoming an astronaut but space travel is only accessible to a tiny minority. So how does the average person fulfil this desire to explore the stars, this existential need to reach up?

I have always been both excited and terrified of the vast expanse above us all. Outer space provokes a different emotional response in all of us: existential wonder, fear, scientific curiosity, disinterest and sometimes a deep-seated psychological response to the unknown. For the last 10 years I have been photographing how ordinary people respond to outer space: mars simulations in Utah and Oman; amateur rocketry festivals in the Black Rock desert; aurora hunters in Iceland; SETI in Pennsylvania, meteor hunters in Morocco; UFO mythology in Roswell New Mexico; Crop circles tourists in Wiltshire, UK; Space Camp for the blind and partially sighted; amateur telescope building in South Africa and some of the biggest telescopes on earth in the Atacama desert. I have investigated the social groups which have formed around space exploration.  This body of work explores the blurred line between reality and fantasy and the existential human need to explore how we fit into the universe.