Output details

41 Hewitt Road 1996-1999

41 Hewitt Road is a 96-page book consisting of 79 colour photographs, accompanied by a series of emails from people who had visited the house and were invited to email a memory from it. The work aims to explore the representation of domestic space in a way that sheds new light on methods for combining texts and images, playing with personal narratives, fact and fiction, and engaging with literary influences in photography. The photos were taken in the late 1990s when I lived in a shared, rambling Victorian terrace: a few of the images were shown or published singly prior to 2008 but the 41 Hewitt Road book project came to fruition between 2008–10. It extends my interest in the use of personal texts to describe experiences with a wider relevance than the purely private, and explores new ideas around documentary storytelling, with an emphasis on creating narratives about contemporary life without actually putting people in the images.

While numerous contemporary photographers add fictional elements to their images and blend fact with fiction, this project turns documentary evidence into an imaginary fictional space through a narrative structure that includes two different methods of picture taking (both resembling archaeological recording methods) and through the use of memory texts combined with the images. A home that was slightly eccentric and not particularly pleasant is transformed into a monument, a museum of memories of those who visited it. The viewer reads the book like a tour guide to a relic of the past: a fictional space is opened up and we can only imagine ‘who were these people that lived in this place?’

The book was funded by Impressions Gallery and the Photographers Gallery, and has been selected for inclusion in Volume 3 of the Photobook (eds. Parr and Badger, Phaidon).