Back to the beginning.

I want to take you back to the beginning. 

I remember the back parlour of my grandmothers house. She called it 'salin' and it is where she held her prayer meetings. On an old dresser by the back wall there stood two photographs, one of each of her parents. They were both black and white, the one of her mother clearly older, and both dead by the early 90's when I remember them first. I've always had a fascination for old photographs. They have and air of "where you are now, we once were and what we are now so will you one day be". Quite morbid for a child, I admit, but to me it had a feeling of reassurance.

In 2006 I bought the first camera I had ever owned. In 2005 I had broken with tradition, burned bridges and settled into a rather unconventional relationship with the man I eventually married. Those two events might seem completely disconnected but they are in fact the main sparks that lit my 1880's fire. He was an artist. The kind who questions life. Shirtlessly painting and smoking on balconies while barely affording to eat. He let me in and encouraged me to pursue my artistic dreams. Everything that had been suppressed for convention and that my inner voice told me was 'unnecessary' flooded out of me. I already knew this was what I wanted to try to do.
For the first time in the spring of 2006 I had enough spare money of my own to buy my self a little red camera. With that I started to document my world and the people in it and it occured to me that even with that I could try to make pictures similar to the ones on my grandmothers dresser. If I could imagine it, why not at least try..

With cheap cameras, library books and apprentice levelled use of photoshop on an internet-less computer I made my first attempts. People I had only just gotten to know posed, sometimes reluctantly, in my poorly lit one room. In clothes I found or made. Some of those people became friends I'm still close to 11 years later. 

I didn't know it then..but these pictures, however crude, were to mark the beginning of a chapter that only really ended with this year. They became just as much a record of us as people as it did an artistic experiment. 

Maybe that's why I will keep on making them. To record the changes of people while keeping them confined to my favourite decade in time. Like a lens through which people can be someone else and them selves entirely at the same time. Because in all other pictures all over the internet and in peoples phones, and there is a lot more of them now than when this started, the surrounding changes, fashion changes..but in my pictures only the person changes. Everything else stays the same. 

So this is where I started. With a base of my sister Erika, Carlos, Sakina and my self. And who ever I could persuade to join us. There was a lot of experimentation. Not all good! and very little access to..well everything. But they definitely have a special place in my heart. Like an ugly baby.

In the autumn of that year I started fashion school and with the improving sewing techniques  this was never going to end, was it..