I never really know where the next body of work will come from.
I hope I never do.
Sometimes it begins with an image. Sometimes with a question I can’t leave alone. Sometimes with a title I’ve had sitting in my diary for some time. It can begin with something so ordinary I barely notice it at first.
This one began with a sound.
The gulls.
Brighton’s gulls are never particularly subtle.
They wake me at odd hours of the morning. They argue on the streets and rooftops. Last year, a small family of gulls took refuge on my roof. I developed a strange bond with them. When I no longer heard their cries in the morning, I worried.
When I first moved here, they were part of the atmosphere of a new place.
Then, at some point, I stopped noticing them.
Or perhaps I started listening differently.
As a photographer, my eyes are trained to look. Sometimes looking tunes everything else out. In my most concentrated moments behind the camera, the world can become strangely silent. Photography has taught me to trust that silence.
After more than twenty years, looking has become instinctive. Light changes and I notice. Someone moves and I anticipate where they might go. Something happens at the edge of the frame and my eye follows it.
Lately, I’ve been training myself to listen before seeing.
It changed my relationship to my surroundings.
When I arrived in Brighton, I wanted to photograph it. What better way to get to know a place than through a camera?
But I found myself drawn to the parts of Brighton I love most… and they come with a sound.
The sea. The gulls. The wind. People on the streets. Music.
So I listened.
To the sea moving against the pebbles. To gulls. To voices disappearing along the seafront. To the sounds outside my window. To things close enough to touch and others I couldn’t quite locate.
I began keeping recordings. Small fragments. Nothing particularly extraordinary.
I wasn’t interested in cataloguing Brighton.
I was interested in what made me feel something.
Gradually, listening began to change the way I looked.
I found myself looking upwards more. Following movement. Waiting. Watching feathered bodies disappear from the frame rather than trying to contain them inside it.
Wings became fragments. Birds became marks. The sky became a space to get lost in. Sometimes the gull was barely there at all. Gulls are much harder to photograph than people.
I wasn’t trying to make photographs of sound.
I was trying to understand what listening was doing to my attention.
I’ve spent much of my life trying to understand belonging through geography.
Where are you from?
Where do you live?
Where is home?
But lately I’ve been wondering whether belonging happens somewhere else entirely.
Maybe we recognise home long before we can explain it.
The sound your front door makes.
Your mother’s voice calling your name.
Your father’s keys jingling as he approaches the door.
Traffic outside the house where you grew up.
The call to prayer travelling through an open window.
The sea against Brighton’s pebbles.
These aren’t necessarily the things we would photograph if someone asked us what home looked like.
And yet our bodies know them.
There are sounds that tell us where we are before we open our eyes.
Over the past few months, I’ve been photographing without entirely knowing what I was making.
I’ve recorded sound. Filmed the sea. Watched gulls disappear and return. Reversed things. Slowed them down. Allowed images to blur. Allowed photographs to be imperfect.
I’ve listened to recordings from other places and other times.
My parents’ voices entered the work.
Egypt entered the work.
Memory entered.
And slowly I began to understand that I wasn’t really making work about Brighton.
I was making something about what happens when a place begins to enter you.
About repetition. Recognition. Distance.
The strange accumulation of small things that makes somewhere unfamiliar feel known.
Perhaps belonging isn’t an arrival at all.
Perhaps it happens almost invisibly.
Sound by sound. Gesture by gesture. Day after day.
Until what once belonged to the landscape around you somehow becomes part of the landscape inside you.
This weekend, these fragments finally leave my studio.
LULL opens in Brighton, the city where the work began.
Photography, moving image and sound will occupy the same space, each carrying something the others cannot.
While installing it, I’ve been thinking about what happens when photographs stop being contained by a screen or a page. When you walk around them. When they move as you move. When you hear something beside them. When you leave and return.
And what stays with you when you walk away.
It feels appropriate that a body of work about belonging should first exist publicly in the place that taught me how to hear it.
LULL
3–16 October 2026
Unit 6, Duke’s Lane, Brighton
Part of Brighton Photo Fringe 2026
More information and programming around the show.
COME MAKE WITH ME
There is another part of LULL that feels important to me.
I don’t want the questions inside the work to exist only on the walls.
Photography can become strangely prescribed. We make projects, build portfolios, think about outcomes and worry about whether something is good. Sometimes we forget the pleasure, and importance, of simply paying attention.
So next weekend, I’m opening up part of my process.
On Saturday 10 October, I’ll lead a small photographic lab in Brighton. We’ll begin inside LULL, then walk, listen, photograph and follow whatever pulls at us. There is no prescribed subject and no list of photographs to return with.
For those who want to take the process further, we’ll meet again on Sunday 11 October to edit, sequence and think about how individual images begin to find a language together.
You don’t need an existing project or an expensive camera.
Bring curiosity. A willingness not to know what you’re looking for yet. And permission to have fun.
LULL LIVE LAB · From Looking to Language
Saturday 10 October · 10.30am–5pm · £95
Optional second day: Sunday 11 October · 11am-4.30pm
Full weekend · £175
Maximum 10 people.
Perhaps home is not only the place we return to.
Maybe it is what returns to us. A voice. A rhythm. A sound carried across distance.
Outside my window, the gulls are calling.
Beyond them, the sea.
I hear them before I see them.
And something in me knows I’ve arrived.
— ⟡ —
A song for this piece:
Just Sine Waves, Martin Roth
Listen on Spotify