Ancestry Visa

In March, 2017 I returned to my home city in order to apply for a new visa for the United Kingdom, where I have lived for several years. Stuck in limbo in Sydney for six weeks, not knowing if I would be granted re-entry to England, and having nothing to do but wander the streets camera in hand, I was confronted with a city that suddenly felt foreign to me. The resulting series is shot from the perspective of a knowing and self-conscious outsider; my subjects look directly at the camera in order to place the viewer in the position of an observed observer. I also attempt to engage with the artificiality of certain symbols with which Sydney is often identified - hence the bags of sand lined up along Manly Beach, as if it constantly needs topping up; and graffiti scrawled across a noisy image of Centrepoint Tower. By way of contrast, the shopping trolley, a much more pertinent symbol of Australian suburbia in my eyes, appears twice in the series. I shot on consumer-grade 35mm film to emphasise Sydney's vibrant and sometimes surreal colours, while also making some images hard to pinpoint in time.