I Used To Be Young

I Used To Be Young is a personal body of work made at a time when people, and groups of people, were part of my everyday life. Connection was constant: friends, crowds, shared spaces. That closeness became the starting point for looking back at a different generation's version of the same feeling.

The project draws a parallel between my own experience and the 1990s Acid House and rave scene, as my father lived it growing up in Merseyside, Liverpool. I never experienced that time myself, but I grew up around the stories: friends gathered near the moors, house parties with vinyl and decks, nights that seemed to hold something hard to put into words. That quality, the thing I could sense but never quite name, is what the work tries to get close to.

Rather than recreate the past as it was, the project works through reaction and reconstruction. My father's memories become the source material, and I respond to them, building direct accounts through my own eyes. The result sits deliberately between reality and fiction. Some moments are drawn from true recollection, others are imagined, and the line between them is intentionally blurred. Memory is never exact, and it changes each time it is passed on. The work accepts that, and treats the gap between his version and mine as part of the subject.

The work focuses on youth, and on the time surrounding the clubs and raves as much as the events themselves: the anticipation beforehand, the quiet and comedown afterward, the ordinary hours spent with friends that gave the nights their meaning. These in-between moments are where the real sense of community lives.

I Used To Be Young is an attempt to feel connected to my father's past, and in doing so to understand how one generation's youth echoes in the next. It is part tribute, part conversation across time, and part search for a feeling that can only be inherited second-hand.

This body of work explores the deep and often unspoken relationship between individuals, their clothing, and the personal environments that shape their identities.

The idea centres on photographing people in their most intimate, personal spaces as they prepare to step out in their favourite outfit. An outfit that they feel best represents who they are. The project then transitions from these private settings to a location in their local area, chosen for its significance or comfort to the subject.

This second space serves as a canvas for a street-style editorial shoot, allowing the individual’s chosen look to be celebrated and contextualized within an environment that is meaningful to them.