Selected for Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2021 and Lensculture Portrait Award, 2021, Dichotomy? is a photo essay that concludes phases in my childhood that made me feel in a state of two opposites. This includes growing up in a middle class area as a poor(er) person and being in a predominantely white area as a mixed child. The essay was created in lockdown at a point of introspection, after the conversatioins which sparked during BLM 2020. I was so excited to begin these necessary interventions around ethnic dialogues, but I found myself in a liminal place, and had to ask myself, what is MY experience ?
During this time I was choosing between two arts degrees, and found myself incorporating the specialism of the degree I hadn’t chosen, into the one that I had . A friend told me that I was like the phenonema “Shrodingers Cat” - he explained that I enjoy being in two places at once, constantly 50/50. It’s this conversation that inspired me to write everything about myself. I quickly realised that I’d been 50/50 in many aspects of life - in one world and another at the same time- and it’s all i knew.
After much thought, I came to the position that, “Most people don’t feel like they belong anywhere but ‘nowhere’ is a place in itself. “ I felt that there must be so many of us that don’t feel like they quite belong to one thing, one culture, one experience, one narrative, and that most of us, if not all, dance in the in between - only with being dual heritage, it’s more obvious. I started to develop research in to the third space theory.
I hoped to write an esssay that not only educated people on aspects of ethinc isolation, to give to friends and family as an awareness of the current conversation, but also that maybe i would find friendship in all those people that have often danced in the liminal. So, whilst the project starts with ethnic exploration, it unravels with layers of oppositions I found in my childhood; in class, parental, education.
The way I presented this project in 2020 was very spirutal, cathartic, private ( almost ). And i think with time I’ve developed a new diaolgue on my positioning. The autobiographical nature of the project means that each story, will always be true . I will also continue to believe that if we accept that we are fusing, in many aspects of life and identity, that we will find more in common than apart.
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