Some Sort of Silence

For many years, Paul has researched and worked around notions of ‘Englishness’ as sociological and anthropological phenomena. This, in part, is related to his upbringing in an English family, whilst having Caribbean and Scottish birth family roots. The area Paul was raised in was culturally very mixed, and yet there were underlying tensions resulting in eruptions of violence and resistance. As a young photographer, Paul would hit the streets when there were anti-Nazi demonstrations, and then go home to discuss what he had seen with his grandmother. He says:

“My foster Nan was an amazing woman. She came to live with us when I was about eight, around the same time I was given my first instamatic camera. I remember being also told by some children that I wouldn’t be allowed to play football with them and was introduced to the N-word. This had a profound impact on me, and decades later when I worked for the British Refugee Council, with unaccompanied children that had survived ethnic cleansing during the Kosova land war, I thought it would be helpful to get the kids out playing football in the morning. It was a glorious riot of children running around the playground, and eventually, some local kids joined in, and I was able to talk to them about the background to what the Kosovan children had experienced, and why they were there at the reception centre. The big issue was trying to encourage the local children to think beyond their ‘Englishness’ as being defined by someone else’s ‘otherness’”

Paul had started working with a 6x9 medium format with slow colour film, more suited for landscape and architectural photography; but as a ‘point and shoot’. “It was when film was cheap, and the saying “film is cheap” was factually accurate.” Unlike working with the small range-finder camera, the large camera afforded no opportunity to conceal oneself, and people would often ask for an explanation about what he was photographing, why and what for? The project didn’t start out as a worked-through ‘project’, but rather was a series of walks photographing things and events that related to concepts of ‘Englishness’ and its associated myths. As a photographer with a training in cultural anthropology and archaeology, Paul decided to focus his images on the material cultures of such everyday myths.

This project is not concerned with replicating traditional views of ‘Englishness’ so often associated with rose-tinted nostalgia and either the greatness or collapse of Empire. The images were made between 2010 and 2020, across various urban and rural spaces in England, and they are not concerned with the ‘documentary realism’ but rather with the de-essentialising of what it means to be ‘English’; a sort of ‘reverse anthropology’ that starts from the construction and deconstruction of cultural and historical myths; and of silence.