Death Rattle
Death Rattle documents my return to north-east England, the region where I was born and raised, in April 2024. As a short-term piece of work taken from a fairly small set of photos, my intention is to publish this as a short single-issue zine.
This was my first visit to the region in over five years, and my first since the COVID-19 pandemic struck in late 2019. My old stomping grounds made an immediate new impression on me, as a part of the world even more depressed and lost than I was expecting (and I wasn’t expecting much).
My previous visits had been fairly positive, enjoyable experiences, but there was something new, something sour in the air this time around. It was everywhere, and it was impossible to escape.
As difficult as this was to come to terms with for me, being someone who would ideally like to feel a positive connection with my home town and its surrounds, I quickly became intent on capturing it. This is a personal project more than a social or political one – it could generously be referred to as a work of documentary photography, but all it’s truly intended to document is my despair.