My mother had a stroke when she was 84 and still very independent. One Saturday morning, completely out of the blue, a blood vessel in her brain ruptured and her old way of life ended.
I visited her quite a lot, most of my time spent running errands and spoiling her because she liked the attention and I liked to give it. Sometimes we’d go through old photographs, some days were spent just watching middle class white people kill each other on ITV3. I found that kind of dull.
So I started to photograph the house with a disabled camera and continued even after she moved to a care home. She died in early 2017 and her house was sold in September 2018.
So much of what is in her house is familiar across other cultures, the family photos, weddings, graduation, holidays, the collections of useless things that bring the owner happiness, other items that need repair, mysterious items that nobody except my mother understood at all.
Of all of these images, the one of the landing is most resonant of her. the exposure was about 8 minuites and in that time she came up the stairs on her stair lift, went to the bathroom and went back down to the lounge. So she’s there, the momvements that she made in front of me were unexpectedly captured while the image was made. This is the essence of her decline. it was a lovely spring day when I took this some time around 2015. what had been lost was clear, but managed. What came next was reduction and further loss.