Un possible-retour
Family pictures are supposed to tell you a story about a happy, unanimous family.
On the old snapshots we might not be more than five years old, and our spontaneity and naivety are striking, while on the day of the re-shoot we play artificial roles.The moment when the original picture was taken happened naturally in a snap, while its re-creation can take weeks of planning and hours of shooting. But ageing is an ever-changing process by way of which familiarity and permanence may also be found.
The good old days
A 571-flats council estate has just been destroyed in Holloway, North London. Up until the very last days before demolition, 31 families still called the Market Estate their home. This place, built around an old clock tower, dated back to the 1960s, and represented a Utopian vision of modern urban planning: some of its residents, of a generation moving on from post-war Britain, had been living there for over 40 years.
For this project, I took a portrait of Jimmy Watts, on of the first resident to have moved into the Market estate in 1967.
“On January 15th I met Jimmy Watts, one of the many living at the Clock Tower Place, in a building that is now demolished. Jimmy shared his life with me. He showed me his old family films, and I discovered that living on the estate once was full of life. »