Miss//Place (blowing smoke)

Memories are made of layers. The interweaving of people, places and times that are significant to us. 

Double exposed Fuji 400. The first exposure circa 2008 at my family’s farm in North Yorkshire testing an old Olympus OM10 I inherited from my late father. I was 12 or 13 when my parents bought the farm, set in beautiful North Yorkshire countryside it was almost in ruin. Time and money to fix it up meant an end to childhood summer holidays in Greece. A point which marked the passing of childhood and the beginning of teenage years when all I had wanted was to escape and the middle of nowhere, no matter how breathtakingly idyllic, felt like an isolating prison. 

The second exposure on by now around 10 years expired film, shot on my mother’s Olympus Trip 35, when I finally revisited Greece earlier this year. Alone, as an adult, escaping the anniversary of some difficult times and hoping to reconnect with a part of my past. Shot in Thessaloniki, which I had visited on my last childhood trip to Greece and whose street map I could still trace from memory 25 years later. And in Athens which though not the first place I’d visited in Greece perhaps forms one of my earliest memories of the place. I had left a stuffed toy dog in a restaurant and my father had run back though the city to rescue it at risk of losing our flight, quite dramatic when you’re 5. 

The places and people who formed me. Meshed together but divided by time.