Every Life is in Many Days

“Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves.”

– James Joyce, Ulysses

At the heart of Every Life is in Many Days (January 2018 - ongoing)

is the notion of return, both in space and in time: A teenage girl revisits the crèche where she formed her first memories; a couple stand in the lobby of the theatre where they met sixty years earlier; an ageing woman peers at herself in a changing room mirror at the pool she once frequented. These are just a few of the fragments of life that make up this work of lyrical documentary.

After gaining access to some of London’s most beautiful disused buildings - a post-war swimming pool, a 19th Century hotel, a Victorian theatre, etc…- and tracking down the people who once occupied them, I playfully recreate scenes from the lives they once had, in the places they once knew - years, sometimes decades, later.

By consciously excluding wide shots of the spaces and not specifying which image was made where, I aim to dissolve the boundaries of time and place, allowing the memories of the various protagonists to blend into one - a collective Memory Palace of sorts. Upon completion of the project, I aim to make a photobook in the vein of Alec Soth’s “Niagara” in which the images are displayed without captions but an index at the back of the book offers the viewer context on specific images if desired.

Working between truth and fiction, past and present, the project combines personal archival materials with newly created images to offer a meditation on the passing of time and photography’s role in mediating memory. Today might be yesterday’s tomorrow, but that doesn’t stop us from looking back.