Area 51
Area 51
For my 51st birthday, we escaped to Germany for a few days. We stayed in a wonderful tiny house, rode some spectacular gravel routes, read books, ate good food and generally tried to slow everything down a little.
But the trip also marked the end of something much bigger: my attempt to photograph my 50th time around the sun. The project had started almost exactly a year earlier, on a similar birthday trip to the Opal Coast in France. I had just turned 50 and decided to spend the following year creating a body of work around being 50.
In the run-up to that birthday, I kept saying that turning 50 didn't really mean anything to me. And in a way, that's still true. The number itself doesn't. I don't suddenly feel old because there's a five at the beginning of my age. But somewhere along the way I realised that it did mean something. Not necessarily in a bad or dramatic way. I simply became more aware that I'm in a different phase of my life. Things shift. Priorities change. Some doors close, others open. You start looking at time a little differently.
My first instinct was to make the project about looking back. Fifty years seemed like a good excuse for some kind of retrospective. But whenever I tried, it felt premature. I'm not ready to turn my life into history yet. So instead, I decided to look at the now. For one year, I photographed whatever felt relevant to me while keeping a journal alongside the images. Everyday life, trips, people, places, quiet moments, things that seemed insignificant at the time. No checklist of important events. No attempt to create a definitive portrait of being 50.
Before starting, I had plenty of concepts and clever ideas about what the project could become. Most of them disappeared pretty quickly. In the end, I just had to shoot. Follow my instincts. Pay attention. And trust that the project would slowly reveal itself instead of trying to force it into a shape I had invented beforehand. I also deliberately shared very little of the work while I was making it. I wanted to work from within, without wondering how individual pictures would be received or allowing outside reactions to influence where I went next.
And then, somewhere between gravel roads, coffee on the terrace and doing absolutely nothing in a tiny house in Germany, the year was over. I already made a broad selection of the photographs, but so far I've mostly left them alone. I was simply too close to them. But slowly, that's changing. After the summer I'll start going through the images again, digging into the journal and distilling the two into something more coherent. The plan is to turn it all into a book.