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DayFour issue 3 Home Is Where...
Published 2004
Cover: Hellin Kay
Where is 'Home'? Is it where you were born? Where you were raised? Is it where your parents are, a place you go to at Christmas/Thanksgiving/Mother's Day? Or is it simply somewhere you go every evening, the place you retire to sleep? Is 'Home' something you make or something you have no choice in? For this issue of d4 our contributors came up with even more answers to the question of 'where' 'Home' might be, or what it might mean. No two answers are quite the same. As Gertrude Stein said, 'There is no "There" there'.
Contributors
© All photography and text in Dayfour is copyright the contributors. All rights reserved
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Home is a Warm Feeling
This is from my bus journey on my way to visit my mother. It's a landscape that makes me feel whole inside. It's where I'm from, I know it, I understand it, but most of all it makes me feel warm and safe inside. Like home.
Contributor Lina Ikse Bergman is a bass-playing photographer who has just finished making a documentary about people who swim outside all year. Escaped Sweden in 1992 and now happily resides in London.
More Lina in d4.4
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Home is... Among Friends
When I first started coming and going back and forth between Moscow, which was
my old home, and New York, which had once been my new home and was now just
my home, I couldn't feel myself 'at home' in either place. Yet I was comfortable
in both. As my trips increased and my friends in both places grew and stuck
around from one trip to the next, I began to realise that home really is that
old cliche of where the heart is. Home is where you feel the love. While these
pictures reflect only one of my homes, I think the emotion they evoke is universal
and can be found anywhere, just as a home can be made anywhere.
Contributor Hellin Kay divides her time between Moscow and New York [since the publication of this issue, also Los Angeles]. She works as a photographer and fashion director.
More Hellin in d4.5, d4.6 and on www.hellinkay.com
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Home is... Fragile
I did a lot of looking out the window and staring into space after the breakdown of my marriage. I was deeply distressed because, as so often in the case of divorce, it was a double loss – not just the loss of my partner but also the loss of the home that I loved and all the memories that went with it. I had to come to terms with the fact that I was going to have to sell my house in order to survive financially. These photographs were of windows in the house. The idea was to transfer them onto small squares of fabric and sew these together to create a patchwork quilt. I had been researching American Quilting Bees and how quilts were originally created from old bits of fabric collected around the house, such as pieces of old curtains and fragments of clothing. Each quilt therefore became a patchwork of memories. I also discovered that quilts used to be made to provide comfort for the grieving. 'Memorial quilts' were made to remember the deceased and often contained bits of clothing that had belonged to the loved one. The very act of working on such a quilt was a healing activity, and the finished quilt became a comforting memory...
Contributor Caitlin Smail studied at the Academie de Porte Royale in Paris, at Cambridge University, and obtained her MFA from Central Saint Martins in London.
More Caitlin in d4.4
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Home is... a Kind of Refuge
These photographs are from the project 'Playing for Blood', conducted in a former coal mining community on the outskirts of Doncaster, West Yorkshire. Initially, each child was encouraged to act out games where they took centre stage over other members of their family and where they directed their parents within the role-playing games that evolved. The children started visiting costume stores as their games became more sophisticated, to help them visualize themselves and their parents as characters. On later visits, these scenes were replayed in more depth, but this time absent of any costumes or props. The parents hold a flash light at eye-level, directed onto the faces of their child. So the children looking into the eyes of their parents are at the same time looking into the light their parents are holding. Although the parents either are outside the frame of the photograph or are obscured by the contents of the home, they are very practically involved in the making of the photographs since they are the source of light entering the photograph, a symbol of a domestic space beyond the frame... Although we often have the image of the home as a private refuge from the world outside, this project offers a picture of the home as a space where public and private influences and ideologies intersect.
Contributor Adam Green has been using photography to explore themes of the family through projects exhibited and published in the UK and internationally. A Masters graduate in Photography from the University of Westminster, Adam is based in London.
More Adam on www.adgreen.co.uk
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Home is... in the Premier League
We live by a football ground. Some days are quiet, some are not. Mostly fans come and go sweetly and you're grateful for living somewhere everyone knows from the sports results. Some days it's serious. It's outside broadcast and cars will be towed away if they block the trucks, cables and sour faces setting up at the start of the day. It's impressive how it comes together, like a kit your dad could build. Lugging made easy so die-hard fans can watch from armchairs and pubs. Damn inconvenient though if you want to gaze wistfully out the window any time in that particular 24 hours. A big juggernaut with VISIONS huge on the side... So, remember, for every slow motion replay you see on TV, some truck is parking slowly, surely, slightly over the pavement outside someone's home, obscuring the sun... Penalty, ref!
Contributor Steve Way has been cartoon editor of Punch (twice), Maxim, Readers Digest, and Jack. He launched The Cartoonist newspaper, and his work has appeared everywhere from The New Yorker to Private Eye. Queens Park Rangers are no longer in the Premier League.
More Steve in d4.1
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Home is All in the Mind
...There is a Home Bay in Alaska. Which doesn't count. I mean, have you ever been to Alaska? So, if no one goes there then what the hell does it matter what it's called. In fact they may as well just have named the whole state Home. It may as least have meant that people would outnumber moose in the region...
Contributor Gregory King says he used to be confused with Brad Pitt because of his flowing blond locks, and also considered a career in acting before realising that his true vocation was as a waiter...
More Greg in d4.4 and at www.gmkphotography.com
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Home is Where the Heartland is
Perched high on a mountain overlooking Pacific Coast Highway at Malibu, Camp Heartland is home to some 70 children, ranging in age from seven to seventeen, for one week a year. Here amongst the treetops, in the August California sun, children who for 51 weeks of the year may hide their or their family's HIV/AIDS status, are free to live without secrets.
Contributor Paula Glassman divides her time between photography and studying for a Masters Degree in International Development at London School of Economics. Both, she says, are good excuses to travel the world and cause trouble.
More Paula in d4.4 and at www.paulaglassman.com
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Home is Familiar Patterns
When I went back the weather was cold and grey. A lot of sitting around, doing nothing. Talking, eating. My dad and I tried hard not to argue. The place has not changed much. And why should it. I suppose it is home, and it isn't. SOmewhere that has always been more about moving away from than coming back to. Almost strange now, nevertheless full of sudden familiarities. SOmewhere where the present can seem to be curiously out of sync with the past...
Contributor Sven Seiffert was born and grew up in Marburg, Germany. He moved to Berlin, working as a cab driver, light technician, and photographer. He now lives and works in London.
More Sven in d4.4 and at www.svenseiffert.com
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The Home Stretch
They're on the home stretch. At this point it's always narrowed down to two situations. One, there's the dog that's been in the lead all the way but second place is slowly taking over, or, two, there are two dogs neck and neck. Either way you can cut the tension with a knife. 'Go on! Come ooonnnnnnn!!!' People cling to their betting tickets as though it's all they've got left in the world. 'Come on number four, take him, come on!'
Contributor Shereese Doyle says, 'I don't like to put a label on what I do. I vary my style of work and medium according to what I feel is most appropriate for the project.' Shereese is in her second year of a BA course in Graphic Design at London's Central Saint Martins.
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Home is... Indiana, Land of the Lost
My memory of my childhood home is foggy at best. While the others reminisce about our youth, I'm the one asking, 'Now who set fire to who, again?' Names almost entirely escape me and I'm left with a random collection of cartoon-coloured images. I remember babysitters with BB guns, bonfires sodden with gasoline, Kools Filter Kings and pork chops. Invented names and the land of the lost in the basement. Chicago's lights on the horizon and buried treasure in the back forty. Houses shaped like guns and the lifespan of a chameleon. Skipping over dead fish on the shores of Lake Michigan; JJ the militant midget; Sister Mary and the Tooth. I remember Indiana.
Contributor Matt Carr is the nicest guy ever deported from anywhere, currently plying his trade in the US of A, where he is still legal – pending court action. Matt lives in New York.
More Matt in d4.2, d4.4, d4.6 and on www.mattcarr.com
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The Housing Project
‘Home’ is moving. For most of us the reality of
home as a stable and secure place where we live for the majority of our lives
is changing. How many of us have moved in the last few years and will soon move
again? Over the last twenty years the world has seen huge economic and technological
changes that have altered our understanding and experience of territorial boundaries.
For those of us living in wealthy Western countries this is often viewed as
a liberating force. We can choose our homes – move from city to city or
country to country. If home is too dull, conservative or cold then you can just
move. Hey – ‘it’s not where you’re from, it’s
where you’re at.’ But for many moving home is not so much a ‘lifestyle’
choice as an economic necessity. The luxury to select when and where to move
is not everyone’s. Despite this, ‘home’ persists as a universal
ideal: a utopian place of belonging and security. It is a continual aspiration.
The huge rise in spending on home security and home improvements demonstrates
our need to feel safe and to belong. Advertising plays on an anxiety that our
homes don’t feel or look quite ‘right.' Perhaps it is no coincidence
that now in the United States, the country that most openly used the ideals
of the happy home for economic development and gain, over one million people
must call prison their home. Notions of home as ‘homeland’ are exploited
by reactionary forces around the world with potentially devastating effects.
Recent events in the Balkans and the Israel/Palestine conflict are some of the
most obvious examples of an essentialist understanding of home. There is nothing
new in much of this: ‘home’ has always been a place laden with memory
and desire. How we become who we are is in part a process of forgetting and
remembering. But, perhaps these very real and massive displacements may help
us see ‘home’ more clearly as an imaginary ideal very far from the
complex reality of lived experience. These photographs show how diverse and
indeterminate an understanding of ‘home’ is. While the surfaces
are real enough both photography and the ‘home’ will always be a
places of the imagination, places which may never be settled.
(Text by Andy Porter)
Contributors Photodebut is an association promoting the work of a talented group of emerging photographers, drawing on their collective strength to develop group shows, publications and commissions. (Above, a selection of the work from Photodebut's d4 project. From left: Rob Batchelor, Inner City Home; Wieteke Teppema, Holiday Home; Maxine Beuret, Don's Cafe (Home from home); Lisa Barber, One Hundred Years (Rae Broughton, aged 102, celebrates her birthday at home in Melbourne.)
More Photodebut at www.photodebut.org
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Home is Where the Party is
Last year I moved back to Ireland having lived away for five years. Almost a year to the day later, I am proud to announce I am, finally, at home. And I know why. After years of trying to figure it out, I have finally realized what makes home, well, home. A dwelling place becomes home when you reach that spiritual moment when you suddenly feel the need to... show it off. Looking back on my somewhat peripatetic lifestyle over the past few years (six years, two continents, seven addresses) I’ve come to discern a definite link between the concept of home and the art of the party. Back when I first left (my parents’) home, fresh out of college and newly hitched, it was the height of pretending-to-be-grown-up to have dinner parties, and we threw ourselves into them with gusto. Living in a flat barely large enough to swing a small West Highland Terrier in (and she never took kindly to the exercise anyway) we somehow managed to fit in a sofa bed, an upright piano, my late grandmother’s dinner service and, routinely, ten people for dinner. We moved to New York, which, of course, led by example, and we gaped our way through outdoor make-your-own-pizza parties, hosted by winemakers in overwhelmingly beautiful brownstones on the Upper West Side; champagne cocktail parties with cucumber-based finger food in cosily dingy Fifth Avenue apartments; and fat-free dips and gallon jugs of wine on the terrace of a forty-fourth floor Theatre District flat. In Chelsea we lived in a tiny studio apartment with a ridiculously small walk-in-single-file-and-don’t-turn-around kitchenette. Parties consisted of up to three close friends sitting with us on our giant bed, which held court in the middle of the room and took up almost the entire space. The view of the Empire State Building from the window made up for the numerous wine stains on the quilt. In the West Village we had an elegant wreck of an apartment in the house which served as the exterior for the home in The Cosby Show. Emerging bleary-eyed and hungover each Saturday morning to be greeted by a group of Japanese tourists taking photos of our front door took some getting used to. But the majesty of the huge marble fireplace, the deeply aged and oft-varnished wooden floors, the trailing ivy and the squirrel who lived on our air-conditioning unit made the perfect setting for entertaining. We would set up a mini beergarden in the window box, where the setting sun would glint and sparkle on the bottles. Our last address in New York was a top-floor unit in Battery Park City, where the canyons of Wall Street provided the most spectacular view from the large windows of our sitting room. Food and drink seemed almost irrelevant with those thousands of little illuminated windows looking like the backdrop to an urban fairytale, to the delight of our guests and ourselves...
Contributor Michelle Hayes has moved again, from Dublin to Wicklow, where she is still hosting extravagant parties.
More Michelle in d4.1 and d4.4
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Home is... Across the Pond
Pictures of family and home become self-portraits for me. Maybe that is all they can ever be. I see myself reflected in younger sisters and brothers, older aunts and cousins. Photographs of one's home are more than descriptions of place and people. They encompass memories: that first bikini, a certain smell of laundry on the line in the backyard, the games we used to play. In my case, the Atlantic has written itself into my personal album. Living abroad makes crossing it an integral part of my experience of home/journey. And the greater the distance, the more precious the tangible photograph.
Contributor Scotia Luhrs grew up in Maine, and after living in Paris, Boston, and New York, opted for London, 'for its sense of humour, eclectic mix of people, and fabulous climate.' She has a Masters Degree in Photography from London College of Printing, and is a member of Photodebut.
More Scotia at www.scotialuhrs.com
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Home is... Everywhere and Nowhere
'Home is where we put our heads down at night, since all our lives we have been on the move. In our hearts we have maybe our ONE home, out of all the places we have been that mean something to us. That one home is everywhere and nowhere. The rest is a question of geography.' (Frank and Maria Olsen, Norwegian and English, living in London)
Contributor Christina Hebe is a 'documentary portrait photographer' whose work has appeared in magazines, books and exhibitions in the UK and her native Denmark.
More Christina in d4.2
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Home is... Community Spirit
At first it was an act of sheer nosiness. My husband and I had been searching exhaustively for a flat in the Clerkenwell area, scouring websites, walking the streets alert for likely looking signage. We finally spotted the house at the end of a long and rather dull property list on the internet. It was way out of our price range but it was beautiful and had a detail which caught our eye. ‘Rear garden leading to communal space'... We walked away from the viewing in a state of feverish excitement. The area was ideal, the house a great project but it was the garden which had so captured our imagination. We had never dreamt of finding so much green space in the heart of London. And so, after six months of begging, borrowing and a thorough raid of the piggy banks (even the one hidden under the stairs, next to the wine-making kit) we finally moved in. Through spring and into early summer I watched the shrubs and roses flower, the kids tear around on their bikes and the adults trying to catch a quiet half hour reading the Sunday papers or sunbathing. But I began to realise the communal garden had things that weren’t so ideal. Protected from public interference, the garden formed a lush green triangle behind the houses on three streets and so was the perfect focusing point for the community – except there was no community feel. People were distant, as they are apt to be in London. The children abandoned crisp bags and coke cans willy-nilly and no attempt was made to keep the garden tidy. These things gave me a feeling of disquiet and finally the motivation to try and change them. In mid-summer we hatched another plan – to try and form some sort of residents’ group...
Contributor Sarah Ward is a freelance designer and occasional photographer. She lives in London and has recently escaped a full-time job, 'to spend some decent time taking pictures, working on creative stuff, and learning to make better home-made wine.'
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Home is... a Light in the Darkness
Eight times! Eight times I’ve stood here and I still can’t do it! What is it with me? But I can’t go in now. Not while they’re all there, having a good time. I didn’t leave because I was bored one Sunday afternoon. I didn’t pack my bags because we lost against Leeds 4-2 in the final. I’ve said sorry so many times that the word became meaningless. But I’m sorrier than you’ll ever know. No, no, no I just can’t do it. I’ll only spoil the party...
Contributor Petek Sketcher says, 'My "thing" is night-time photography, capturing urban and atmospheric scenery involving artificial light. Maybe I was a moth in my previous life.' Deborah Kenny spends her days at a TV listings magazine, and her nights writing about her two main interests – love and destruction.
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Dreams of Flying
‘Second star to the right, and straight on till morning.’
That, Peter had told Wendy, was the way to Neverland. For Neverland is always
more or less an island... On these magic shores children at play are forever
beaching their coracles. We too have been there; we can still hear the sound
of the surf, though we shall land no more. (J.M. Barrie, Peter and Wendy,
Hodder and Stoughton , London, 1911)
I hear that ‘sound of the surf’ quite often, and my photographic
images are my attempts to land on Neverland’s shores again, where I have
been so many years ago and where I long to return sometimes in order to explore
its nature and to enjoy its rules – in the confines of being grown-up...
Contributor Jan von Holleben, founder of Photodebut, says he is 'excited about simply any aspect of photography'.
More Jan in d4.4, d4.6 at www.janvonholleben.com
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Home is... Beside the Seaside
Worthing, my home town: extracts from The Worthing Sentinel
1851: Margaret Brown, 15, was convicted of begging and sent to the house of
correction for fourteen days. Worthing magistrates said the town was infested
with vagrants, and it was their job to assist the police in ridding Worthing
of them.
1945: The Mayor of Worthing, JA Mason, said of the south coast railway: ‘We
have five stations and we are ashamed of every one of them. The first impression
people get of a town is the station, and I could imagine a great many of them
going back on the next train.’
1946: Mrs Effie Methold, honorary secretary of Worthing Council for Social Service,
said: ‘We have been besieged with elderly people who have lived on small
incomes in boarding houses or small hotels and have been asked to get out to
make way for the holiday visitors with
more money.’
1953: When Worthing Corporation officials travelled to London to discuss with
the Government what could be done about the town’s terrible seaweed problem,
they took with them a paper bag full of dead flies which had hatched in the
dreaded weed.
1977: Worthing Borough Council agreed to purchase a framed photograph of the
Queen to mark her Silver Jubilee – but only if it didn’t cost more
than £60.
Contributor Jude Evans is a photographer, writer and artist who has recently escaped (again) from her home town of Worthing. Jude lives and works in London.
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Home is... a Private Place
Contributors Photographer Bronwyn Kidd left Australia in 1992 with a one-way ticket to London and a camera. Fashion Editor Sarah Newton started her working life riding racehorses and cooking in Tennessee. Bronwyn recently returned to Australia for a couple of years but is now back in London, where she and Sarah are working together again.
More Bronwyn in d4.4 and at www.bronwynkidd.com
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The Doll's House
Contributor Photographer Andrew Clatworthy thought moving from east to west London was momentous, but has recently relocated to Whitstable. He's still happy to travel around the world for work.
More Andrew in d4.4
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Home is Where...
Who are you? Philip and Amelie
Where are you from? Vienna, Austria
Where do you live, and why? New York. We wanted to live and work here for
a while
Where, or what, is ‘Home’? Home: a state of mind. A country,
a town, maybe a single corner in your parents’ house hallway. Your relationships,
you and your partner, your family. The time you spend drinking with your friends
in a smoky Beitz’n Saturday night and the breakfast with your grumpy sisters
next morning. The smell of early spring evening. The sunlight reflected on glacier-topped
mountains, shadows cast by your hometown’s monuments. Home: a state of
mind, on a journey between where and who you are and where and who you always
wanted to be.
Contributors Philip Ginthoer and Amelie Weinwurm now live in Munich, Germany, with Lio and Anselm.
More Amelie and Philip in d4.4, d4.6 and at www.weinwurm.eu
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