48pp; 145mm x 200mm
Assembled from parallel archives of my film photography and poetry, Giving Notice is “a reluctant love letter to the decisions that we make and the often-monotonous nature of life”.¹
Without knowing what it would grow into, I went through every poem and photograph he’d made over the course of a two year period before he decided to resign from a busy and consuming job. Returning to these printed fragments again and again – in his studio, in bed, on a family holiday, in at least one dream – patterns began to emerge.
Initially, I was surprised by what I found: an increasingly fragmented attention; whiplash born of transitions between suburban tangles and inner city crispness; being knocked off kilter by the kids’ questions; an obsessive relationship with the surface of the river I’d cross almost every day.
In Giving Notice, these threads come together as an ode to the friction that comes from paying a kind of ritual attention to the rhythms and structures of our lives.
Buy a copy for £10 from Photoworks.
Giving Notice was commissioned as a part of P5, a new photography and poetry pamphlet series directed by Photoworks in partnership with David Solo, and designed by Jane & Jeremy.
¹from Hannah Geddes’ essay, Without Rivalry or Redundancy. Part of Photography+ In at least one dream! #30.