What Happened Here came about almost by accident.

Personal projects have become increasingly important to my professional photographic practice as they allow me to exercise my creative skills outside of the constraints of a client brief.

For several years I’d shot personal work using the same digital cameras I used for client work, and couldn’t understand why they weren’t giving me the fulfilment I was seeking until I realised that the workflow was too similar to my paid work.  And so in 2017, with no particular project in mind, I decided that my next project should be shot on film.

Not having much budget at the time, I asked around my contacts to see if anyone had any old film languishing in a freezer drawer they might be willing to sell me. Helen Stone, Andrew Spiers and David Hoffman all stepped forward with offers, and I ended up with a huge mixed bag of film types, from black and white to colour transparency in 35mm and 120 formats. With some of the stock having expired in the late 1990s (some having been manufactured in the former East Germany) I decided to try a few rolls out at a derelict industrial site in my home town of Frome, Somerset, known locally as Saxonvale. I figured that if the film was no good, at least I hadn’t committed a lot of time to a lost cause.

However, within a few initial visits I was seeing something interesting emerge, and what started as a bit of fun turned into a two-year project with a darker narrative than I had anticipated.

The photo of Brockie the dog was taken one morning when I made a visit to discover that the travellers and homeless people who had been living on one section of the site had been evicted. Rather than poking my lens into their distress, I looked for a picture I could make which while not necessarily telling the story in itself, would allow me to illustrate the situation in a more oblique way. Brockie was one of two dogs belonging to a pair of travellers, and oblivious to the drama which had unfolded, he did what dogs do and played with the biggest stick he could find while his owners considered their next move.

If I remember correctly, this was the same morning I helped one of the evictees shift their caravan to another part of the site. That evening I was shooting a fundraiser for a client and found myself in a roomful of multi-millionaires. It was a surreal contrast.

This shot was taken on expired Kodak Portra using a Canon EOS 1N and 40mm lens, a combination I used for many of the 35mm images in the project, while for the medium format film I used a Bronica SQ-A.