I didn’t always understand why I was drawn to certain details when photographing people. I only knew that my attention kept returning to the quiet things — the spaces they inhabited, the objects they lived alongside, the traces of a life held gently in place.
When I photograph someone, I’m not only interested in their likeness. I’m interested in what surrounds them. How a room is worn into familiarity. What is kept close. What has been touched often enough to soften with use. These details are never incidental. They speak — quietly, but clearly — about identity, memory, and belonging.
Being invited into someone’s world with a camera carries responsibility. It asks for care, patience, and restraint. Portraiture, for me, is not about extraction but about presence — about noticing what is already there and allowing it to remain intact.
This way of working became especially clear during a personal project I made of my grandparents, Beat and Fred, in my early twenties. I photographed them instinctively, moving between their portraits and the intimate details of their home. Their reading glasses resting on a lace doily. The familiar surfaces of a small two-bedroom council house in Redditch that had shaped my understanding of comfort and routine.
At the time, my family found it curious — even faintly amusing — that I was photographing everything. I didn’t have the language to explain it. I only knew it felt necessary to record not just who they were, but the world they moved through each day.
Now, with Beat and Fred no longer here, I understand that instinct more clearly. Those photographs hold more than memory. They hold presence. They bear witness to lives lived quietly and fully, and to the love embedded in ordinary things.
Portraiture matters to me because it allows time to settle.
It makes space for recognition.
And it offers something lasting — a way of remembering, of honouring, and of staying connected.
Fred’s bedside table.