Output details

A Passage through Place: Migrant Homes in London

Focusing on a series of migrant experiences in London, this photo-essay seeks to explore the complexities of being ‘out-of-place’, and the experience of setting up a ‘home’ outside of one’s homeland. The research involves photographing the interiors of the newly established homes of migrants in the city, both in relation to their experience as displaced persons, and in the way a domestic space is set up (with particular focus on the ways in which visual imagery and cultural icons are used in a private context) as representations of their identities and sense of cultural belonging.

The process entailed a series of original interviews with a range of subjects who offered personal and insightful narratives about their conceptions of 'home' and their experience of migration. The photographs of depict the interiors of their homes in London and function only to offer a glimpse of these physical spaces. The text accompanying each photograph serves to contextualise the images, through the voice of the subject narrating their experience, as well as my description and analysis of these environments.

In turn, however, my photographic work implicates the way the photograph becomes part of a complex series of constructions which raise questions about private terms of reference, of space, and interpretation. In these terms, the images depicted raise questions about their anthropological terms of reference and the ways in which meaning is both relative to and dependent upon the specific context in which the photograph is made, read and used.