England Keep My Bones (portraits of the Working People of Somerset)2011

In 2011 after creating a set of portrait projects in various cities including London, Venice, New York and Beijing I decided that I should return home to capture the character of English working class people (there was no sense of Brexit happening at the time and we were all good Europeans). So I wanted to create a work which amplified the dignity of the working person by shooting at 4K (some 6 years before this become a functional resolution for most film makers and I had been working at this level since 2008). In capturing such high quality images it meant that we could project those images very large and maintain the impact of the person before the audience - the details themselves were impactful in delivering evidence of the lives people had lived) - in fact 20 feet high - such that the dignity of the working person, the person who accepts that labour is a discipline for the improvement of the self then reveals (if that is society can be organised around their labour so that no one is exploited). The interesting thing to me in meeting just this kind of person is that they go their own way, they negotiate their relationship to capital so that they retain their integrity and partially they do this by loving their trade such that it protects them. Here you’ll see the expressive dignity of miners, cheese makers, apothecaries, letter carving, writers, bee keepers, postal workers - this may seem nostalgic and sentimental in form but look into the eyes of these people and see their dignity which defeats cynicism. The duration of each portrait is relative to the time necessary for their character to register.