Paul Hill considers… Home is So Sad by Tom Hill
Ioften think that every photograph is a self-portrait in some way or other. Why? Because the photographer has made a subjective decision about how, what, and when to make the image. But what about working to a tight brief set by someone else?
Good point. But when photographers choose the subject matter, I believe the resulting images conform to the theory above whether they are literally in the picture or not.
On the MA course at De Montfort University, Leicester, we asked photography students to produce a personal body of work unlike anything they had done before. As they were mature adult learners, they had rich life histories to draw upon – and most were very revealing.
Memories One such student was Tom Hill (no relation) who decided to focus on his family. He chose to photograph his grandmother’s house before having to sell it. Each room was full of memories, most of which were not happy ones.
He called the project Home is So Sad, after Philip Larkin’s most famous poem from The Whitsun Weddings (1958) about his parents. Tom’s parents, like Larkin’s, were always fighting. This constant conflict, together with psychological abuse and physical neglect sent him ‘properly off the rails’.
Long exposure Tom explains how and why he put himself in this picture: ‘I took this picture on my old Hasselblad 500c using a tripod and the camera’s self-timer, with the shot framed onto my grandmother’s dressingtable mirror. I used neutral-density filters, so I could obtain a five- or six-second exposure. After sitting on the bed for about half the duration of the open shutter, I simply sat up and moved out of shot to produce this “ghost” image of myself.’
That MA project from 1998 features in Tom’s new book The Cobbler’s Children were the Worst Shod (the title is an ironic reference to parental neglect, particularly that of his mother, who held a senior position in social services). It is a powerfully candid, sad, but also frequently humorous series of anecdotes that tellingly reflects his turbulent and traumatic childhood, addiction to alcohol, broken relationships and painful isolation as an adult, all described through the prism of photography. Initially he published each anecdote with an image
