Eighteen to Twenty-One

Made between 1998 and 2000, these two early series — The Mods and Studio 24 — mark the years when photography first became a way of belonging for me.

The projects were made in two distinct club cultures: a Soho Mod revival and an Edinburgh techno night. Each offered its own codes of dress and belonging, its own rituals of escape. For me, as a young photographer just beginning to understand the medium, they were also spaces of permission. At eighteen, and again at twenty-one, I was learning to look, to frame, to engage with people who were performing versions of themselves. In photographing them, I was also beginning to see who I might be.

There’s a photographic innocence running through both series—made in the last moments before the digital age, when to be photographed still meant to pause, to offer something up. The boys and girls in these images weren’t constructing identities for a feed; they were simply standing in the brief light of a flash, existing in that unrepeatable instant.

Together, these works mark a beginning: a time when I was falling in love with photography not for what it could show, but for what it allowed. It was a way to locate myself - in time, in youth, and in the act of seeing.