About 'Expats: Living in 'La France Profonde''
Immigration to the UK remains a contentious issue; in this project I wanted to consider how the immigration debate could be looked at from a different perspective. I wondered whether reversing the usual us/them binary of the immigration debate might be productive, i.e., when 'people just like us' are abroad and become 'other' themselves. Therefore, I set out to document the experiences of expats living in, and adapting to, a different culture. While doing so, I hoped to avoid the clichés surrounding the expat lifestyle, and present their experiences as uniquely their own, allowing them to talk freely at interview about anything that they felt was important. Thus, a major theme of this project was the concept of ‘otherness’ and how people responded to it.
In my photographic practice I take a documentary approach, using the medium as a form of cultural anthropology. In this series I use typology to draw out both similarities and differences between the subjects. I use a square format, balancing a central subject with their surroundings.