This, of course, was not supposed to happen. My wife’s recovery seemed to be assured. Illness and hospitalisation had been relegated deep into my most distant memories.
But within a few hours this seemingly benign world had shattered. A new, threatening reality had made a sudden and unsolicited appearance. My wife, was back in hospital. Unknowingly, I was embarking upon a rapidly moving journey, a journey that was to pull together a maelstrom of emotion. Those swirling emotions and the accompanying states of mind included ignorance, loss of control, fear, hope, searching for a form of escape and the final relief of recovery, albeit with unanswered questions.
In this series of images I attempt to capture and portray this period of turbulence.
To create the images, I turned my back on my traditional genre, street photography, and moved to an unfamiliar rural environment. I experimented with less conventional approaches, such as intentional camera movement, as a means of recreating those swirling episodes and emotions. To physically convey a feeling of fragility, each image is created from two layers. The first, containing the photograph, is printed on very thin paper, a process that introduces both texture and unpredictable flaws. The second underlying layer contains the typewritten text which only becomes fully visible when a light source is placed behind the image. The images here are therefore only a digital approximation.