At this point my mojo for this project came back, and I started to think more like what I thought a documentary photographer was. I started looking in to the work of people like Robert Frank, Ernst Haas, Saul Leiter, Daido Moriyama, Todd Hido, Joel Meyerowitz, Lee Friedlander, Alec Soth, William Eggleston, W. Eugene Smith, and Stephen Shore. I’d begun to finally take myself somewhat seriously as a photographer… you know… as seriously as someone like me can ever take themselves :P

I started asking myself what would these photographic heroes of mine do with this subject matter? What would they focus on? I didn’t want to be the next ‘them’, I wanted to be the first ‘me’… whatever the hell that means. When I spotted things of interest I’d wonder, much like Gary Winogrand, what would they look like as photographs? So I started photographing more of the things that caught my eye. When I was in the first year of my degree back in 2008 I wrote a piece about the Obey Giant stickers and how they function as an experiment in phenomenology… I wish I had a copy of it, as I can’t remember a damn word I wrote, where I got the idea from, or what my argument was. However, I was a sticker artist in my 20s, so combine that with the essay from13 years previous and you have two things that combine to point a finger at something I am fascinated with… stickers.

I turned my lens on the stickers I would see around the stadium. After those it was things that could represent the idea of the team without having to show it itself. The project started to gain a direction and approach. I was starting to piece together what it was I was trying to capture, an idea I’d been fascinated with since 2008… how do you paint a portrait of something without showing it directly? I was still very much at a distance from the club, but the idea of embracing being on the outside looking in became the core of the work for me. The distance was what would take me closer.