FEET

You will not know this but for the past six months I have been taking photographs of my feet.

This started as I embarked on a short course in Artists' Books in January of this year. The Tutor asked us to do something every day for the duration of the course, as a small exercise to have us thinking about repetition and how this could translate into a book.

At this time I was struggling within the whirlwind of a very intense and depressing job. Every day I would wake in blackness, push myself towards consciousness and fall into a bus. As dawn was breaking I would be hurtling towards the farthest fringe of civilisation, my life in hiatus, waiting for the right time to arrive. I lived out 8.30am to 5pm suspended in a cocoon of wax, desperate for the day to finish so I could stumble back onto the same bus, the one that would take me home again. Home, where I would collapse and with each outward breath shrink further and further away from the final dying hours of the day.

Month upon month I shuttled.

Back and forth.
Forth and Back.

To and Fro.

A heavily weighted pendulum swinging and swinging but never catching.

This was it, this was life, the routine and repetition - so this had to be captured. I began to take pictures of my journey, the sky and my surroundings.

I quickly realised that I would need more in order to sustain the project and so I turned to my feet. In what has become a reverse selfie, my new routine and the antithesis of a Kim Kardashian moment. Un-glamarous "hashtag no filter".


Without context or explanation, however, what will this endless string of photographs of my own two feet become?

Currently I am approaching this project in a similar way to Everywhere I Park My Bike which was a short-lived project made in August 2009 wherein I photographed every place I parked my bicycle. The aim was to produce an on-line string of boring and pointless documentary photographs to parody people's blogs detailing their exciting skiing or hiking adventures, travels, etc. It was incredibly hard not to try and photograph the bicycle in an interesting way and after ten days I had bored even myself with it.

Now, however.. (in terms at least of feet) I have recruited a point of contrast and comparison in the form of my sister. For thirty days we will each photograph our feet and as a further point -to flip the project upside down and bring new perspective- we are also simultaneously taking photographs of what is above us, be it sky or ceiling.

The project is named Sisters: To and Fro. For now you will find it presented in a new blog here: http://sisters-toandfro.blogspot.co.uk