JPG: Stories: Photo Essay: This ordinary life

This ordinary life

By Kristin Mitchell

12 Mar 2009

I decided recently to do a photo project, reflecting on places that had been significant in my life. Each place was different, and to anyone else, looked like an ordinary place that you might walk past or drive past and not consider at all.

But to me, each place had held a memory, and I wanted to record it.

I dream a lot about places I've been, places I've lived, I often have recurring dreams about those places. I thought I'd like to try and recreate some of that mood, the idea of a dream like state in each of my photographs. The figure in the photographs is me - a self portrait, but like in a dream, it's the faceless character with their back to you, in an empty space.

I decided to go back to where I was born - a town in the west of Scotland. I often dream about the house where I spent the first ten years of my life. I took a photograph at the house where I grew up. The shot of me on the street corner with the umbrella is where we used to catch a bus to school. The umbrella is significant - we used to make a temporary den before the bus arrived, and anyone with their own umbrella which could create a wall or ceiling of the den, was invited to join in. The third in this series is where my school used to stand. It was an old school, built at the start of the 19th Century, and knocked down to make way for a small housing estate. Nowadays, it would be preserved and built into luxury flats. What saddens me is that I don't own a single photograph of the interior or exterior of that school, particularly as I was so happy while I was there. The fourth image is from the town library, where I used to spend Saturday afternoons with my father, browsing mahogany bookshelves and deep maroon coloured carpets. I remember there were glass cabinets next to the children's department, filled with model replicas of scenes of war, from the days when war was considered a more noble thing and conducted in battlefields with men on horseback.

The final image was taken at a local park space, near the house where I was born, and the view looks to the east, you can see about 20 miles from this hill. More significantly for me, this marks the twentieth anniversary of when we moved east.

Doing this project was a good opportunity to capture images of places which I dream of. I felt like I could finally have some method of addressing those dreams, have something visually recorded to help calm their recurrance. It also made me think about places which were important to me, and gave me something to remember them by. Sometimes, you can be the centre of your own photo story, documenting a life, no matter how ordinary.