So, one day at work I get told Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney have bought Wrexham AFC… to which my response is something along the lines of “No they haven’t, fuck off with that nonsense, don’t believe everything you read on Facebook”… yeah, so I was wrong about that.

Anyway, so they buy the club, and at this point I’m still in the closet about being a Wrexham fan, so I say little and just keep on taking the shots I take. I’m taking less shots in this period though. Photographing the lights doesn’t excite me quite the way it did initially as I’m worried about just repeating myself over and over again with the work. People are rushing to see Ryan and Rob when they come to the town, and people ask me if I intend to photograph them, and I say no.

I made zero attempt to see them when they first came over as I wasn’t really that interested in them. I didn’t want to take the same photo everyone else would be taking, and photographing famous people in public has never really appealed to me. Do I regret not having shots of them during their first visit? Not at all. This project, whilst being about Wrexham AFC, is about my relationship with the subject. I’m not here to take promotional photos that only show the good, nor am I here to take photos to make it look bad. I just photograph how my life intersects with it. At this period, I stepped away from photographing about it, something about the celebrity spotlight on the club put me off pointing a camera at it. So rather than take images for the sake of it, I took a sort of break and only photographed when I felt engaged with it again… but even with that break, it was still bubbling under the surface, slowly building in to a proper thing for me. That gap in my photos is properly representative of how I felt at that time. Was I doing this for me, or because famous people have bought the club and I wanted to jump on the bandwagon?

I know that it wasn’t because of them that I came back to it, the work made before they turned up shows that, but I just wanted to be sure I wasn’t in it for the wrong reasons.