Elegy
By the time I was five years old, both my younger brother and sister had died. Their cause of death was an ultra-rare genetic condition. Both were under a year old.
I was the eldest child, but I was then raised as an only child. It is a contradiction I kept to myself for 45 years, until my parents died. I then realised that I'd never examined the events of my early childhood from my own perspective. Instead, I had totally internalised what had happened.
I decided to tell the story of my siblings and my parents by photographing the house I grew up in, which had witnessed everything. My parents moved into the house in 1967 and they never left.
Mum would often say to me: “You are my one and only”. As I grew up, I began to see this as more than an expression of a mother’s love for her son. Wrapped up within it were other layers of loss, grief and sorrow. It was a phrase that came to sum up both my mum's pain and the burden of being the surviving child.
I photographed the rooms, the clutter, the dirt and the light. I bagged up the dust under the bed and got it analysed to see what hidden worlds it contained. I selected several objects to be x-rayed so that I could see their inner workings.
Everything in the house fascinated me. Without intending to, mum and dad had prepared everything for me. All I had to do was notice things - in some ways properly for the first time. The project is a self portrait that is also a conversation between the past and the present.