Stories of Belonging


This image is from an auto-ethnographic research project exploring my sense of belonging as a single parent living in a mixed-tenure London neighbourhood. I took a series of environmental portraits over two years, representing both closer and more distant local relationships, with the images suggesting some of the tensions and exclusions that accompany the desire to belong in a city you did not grow up in. This photograph is of neighbours who lived opposite me and suggests their own sense of belonging, as a family, as Londoners, as neighbours and as national citizens. The photographs explore how belonging in a local place connects to wider geographies, with the images suggesting the simultaneity of the material, the imagined and the emotional. See more images from the series here.