Each time Laura visited, she documented the living, breathing routines of life, the way wallpapers change and decay, the way some streets stay the same, the eternal cyclicality of nature. In one photo, milky foams of sea water on the beach promise to return over and over, just like Laura, who always came back to Sheppey. Some of the places Laura remembers as a child don’t exist anymore, left to disappear or fated to decline in the face of modernisation. “Sheppey itself, cut-off from mainland Kent, faces challenges of hardship, with Sheppey East ward being recently deemed in the top 1.5 per cent most deprived areas in the country,” says Laura. “A stark reality for the communities of these seaside towns, I felt it important to capture the immediate locations surrounding the house during that decade, as a record of culture and society in a broader sense.”
The book was edited over nine months in Laura’s darkroom – but the task of editing was more challenging than shooting, due to the fragility of the images and tough curatorial process. Along with her partner Thomas (from Guest Editions), the pair put together the first edit and found a natural sequencing, driven by the narrative thread of her grandparents’ life in chronological order. “I wanted the book to feel like an object that could exist within the era and style of the house,” shares Laura. “I always envisioned it being orange or green like the curtains my nan had made – we found the exact shade in a Windsor cloth to cover the book. On the cover there is a small tip-in photo of a wall that we used as a goal to play football as kids. The back of the book in gold foil holds the title: Close to Home.”
Driven by “an instinctive need for presence”, the challenge of Close To Home was to draw closer attention, to confront mortality and to honour the love Laura and her family share. As the project progressed the photographers grandparents started to decline in health and they moved downstairs to the living room. The life they knew began to change. A focus point in the book, the martial bed, is seen throughout the decade – the viewer witnesses its undoing and eventual emptying. But something about the sun, in these photos, suggests they’re still there, occupying those rooms, the nature, the water – in healing rays, that familiar hug of light.