Love Stories (2012-2014)
It is a simple and unremarkable fact that almost every person on the planet exists because their parents met, at some point in the past.
Unremarkable, and yet poignantly important to the story of every one of us. Many life-stories might well begin with 'my parents met...'
I collect remembered stories from couples in long-standing relationships, as to how each met the other - I ask them to write down their memories, independently and without discussing it in advance. This results in two descriptions of the same event or a series of events, sometime in the past. Since then, these two people have joined their lives in some way, by living together, getting married, having children, grandchildren. As time goes on, the consequences of that one moment continue to reverberate, more people come into the world and the generations progress.
Chance, determinism, arranged marriages, bumping into someone at a bus stop, meeting a party, on the side of a hill. In hindsight all of these meeting moments are pivotal in our personal histories. It is these beginnings, and the memories of these meetings, which these images celebrate.