Last year, I made a book. As often happens with creative undertakings, it has taken time and distance to understand how I feel about it, particularly because it’s shaped by very personal experiences. The work continues my photographic exploration of the city’s periphery: that liminal space just beyond the urban, but not yet rural. It also probes my own personal boundaries, made during a period of profound change in my life, what you might call a midlife crisis of sorts. As a wise friend reminded me, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the original meaning of crisis is “a state of affairs in which a decisive change for better or worse is imminent; a turning point.”
This book is my attempt to make sense of that turning point: to explore what it means to be in my fifties, to be queer in my fifties, to inhabit an ageing body, to consider how others respond to that body, and to examine how I feel about how others feel about it.
Walking, using that same ageing body, is central to my creative process. I often make sense of my progress while moving through the landscape, turning over ideas and reflecting on the direction of the work. As the title suggests, Queer Journeys Through Suburbia documents trips made on foot through the landscape of south Manchester. With my camera, I re-walked routes first taken through the GPS pathways of queer dating apps, seeing the mundane scenery of suburbia through what could be described as hot-pink-tinted spectacles.
These journeys, the app-based exchanges, and my body become entwined in the book as I attempt to offer a new reading of my suburban postcode, developing an inclusive visual storytelling approach that reflects how the British landscape is multi-layered, inhabited, and navigated by all kinds of diverse creatures.
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