Not being hugely quick on the uptake, I still didn’t realise that this was a project about the club I was working on. I still saw things as snaps and arty shots, and not a concerted effort to document something and find my relationship to it. I just thought I was taking pictures of floodlights.
I was busy with my jobs in the art school and the university library, not knowing that within a few months of the first image on this page we would be in lockdown due to Covid-19. It was around this point where I realise I’d been looking at stuff regarding the team, and the matches. Working in the library on Saturdays and evenings meant I’d often be walking home away from the stadium, through crowds of people heading towards it. It became a habit to check if there was a home match that shift, and especially to check the scores if I was finishing after one, to gauge the mood of the crowds.
Sometime around those early days working in the library, I’d gone from casually checking scores to giving a shit. But I don’t know exactly when it was, there’s no specific date. It was certainly informing my practice though, whether I’d realised it or not at the time. I’d begun calling myself a ‘documentary photographer’ around this time, though I didn’t feel like one, and felt my ‘documentary work’ was limited to the art world. I seemed to be the only person with a camera regularly photographing art events, so by default I was the photographer who documented things, not because thats what I felt my practice actually was.
These shots kinda disprove that, showing my desire to document things was always there under the surface, I’d just been waiting for permission to call myself a documentary photographer officially. I knew it was my love, and I knew I was into football, I just couldn’t really admit them to myself or other people yet.