‘You can only walk so far’
Here are a few more frames from this project. Truthfully, I thought I’d never post any of these, but after revisiting them over the last week, I found a through line and the series began to take shape. There’s still some gaps and sequencing to complete before it’s finished, but these are some of my favourites.
Tahiris at The Barbican last January
I promised myself at the beginning of the year that I would stop gatekeeping my own work. I have a pretty severe case of perfectionism, which keeps a lot of my personal work hidden from others. Maybe I’ll always have that impulse, but I’m ready to share more of my photos going forward. Here’s one that I shot with Tahiris in the beginning of 2025. I’m still working on my personal style, but I do quite like this one. Thank you Tahiris for always being so easy to shoot with <3
I’ve spent a lot of time this year documenting other people, so I wanted to take a moment to capture myself. I still struggle to look at myself — always hoping to find something that will make me worthy or desirable to someone (whatever that means). But I’m beginning to realise that this is the body that has kept me going for so long. No matter how much I’ve abused or disconnected from it, I’m still here, which is a gift. I want to live more in the present moment and care for the person I am now, rather than always worrying about who I was or who I want to be.
Hopefully I can start to live by that.
‘You can only walk so far’
These photos are from my ongoing personal project, ‘You can only walk so far’, which began as a way to make sense of the loneliness and paralysis of English suburbia. We shot these at Jack’s house towards the end of last year. Since we both grew up around the same area, we spent a lot of time talking about the complicated feelings of being back at home. Although our experiences were different, we both felt a level of detachment from the spaces we lived in.
“A very real conflict inside me, that I waged on myself from a young age and still very much wages on, is the deconstruction of my identity (particularly gender), whilst embracing my masculinity, or manhood. From the moment I felt an ounce of pressure on what I, a young boy, should be wearing, I chose a blouse and nail varnish. I made that decision purely to go against expectation. But I played football in the cage, and ‘Take-Down’ effectively every day. Sounds ridiculous but I felt like a walking contradiction, so it’s no wonder I wanted to leave - My home just didn’t make sense to me. Only coming back after years of being away do I question whether it was the environment that drove me away, or this conflict inside myself that pushed me.”
