Places Are What Remain
Claire Huish’s photography focuses on how we remember. Inspired by the idea that ‘Places are what remain,’ she uses her camera to hold onto fleeting moments. Claire loves the way film development, with its imperfections, creates unique and almost painted-like images. Driven by a love of life and a curiosity about how memories work. Claire’s photographs show the beauty in everyday things. She’s interested in how pictures become memories, and memories become pictures, and how they mix together. Through her work, Claire shows how photography can make us feel nostalgic and create new stories from the past.
“Perhaps it’s that you can’t go back in time, but you can return to the scenes of a love, of a crime, of happiness, and of a fatal decision; the places are what remain, are what you can possess, are what is immortal. They become the tangible landscape of memory, the places that made you, and in some way you too become them. They are what you can possess and what in the end possesses you.”
Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost
PLACES ARE WHAT REMAIN
“I don’t like to let go of what I love, have loved. I am afraid of not living fully and I find myself grasping for moments before they slip beyond my reach into the past. Photography gives me a way to keep things, to make the ephemeral permanent. I am obsessed withremembering. I make endless lists: films I’ve watched, books I’ve read, places I’d like to go to, things my friends like, locations to photograph, songs for every mood. I am fascinated by the dynamism of our memories, and the interconnected chains we create from seemingly unrelated moments. This place reminds me of that time - and I wonder what that person is doing now - and why does that song come to mind? Yet if the same memory is thought of on another day, in a different mood, when the light is changed, the rabbit hole of thoughts may take an entirely different turn. The same happens with images I have made - the colours and shape of a wilting flower will remind me of a firework; or a horse’s matted hair will remind me of long grass at golden hour.
Can images replace memory? Sometimes when you think you are remembering a moment from childhood, you are in fact remembering a photograph of that moment from an old, sun-faded family album. What is remembered? And what is an image, seen and stored? But then the mind cannot recall an image perfectly, and so the way in which it is remembered adds another layer. Photographs become memories and memories become photographs and the edges between the two get blurred.
I started developing film in my kitchen in the summer of 2019, partly because it satisfies a need to control the whole process, but also because, paradoxically, there is space for human error. It is within this space that sometimes a more painterly result is found: distorted colours, scratches, air bells - along with one mysterious film that came out entirely blank except for one jagged edged frame. It has also slowed down my process as I develop one roll at a time - so I am always working months and sometimes years behind myself. I feel the “incubation period” where I don’t see the images is important, and I let my memories of the time and place play out in my mind. By the time I develop the film, scan in my nega- tives and get to work on my grading, I am working from the hazier colours of memory and emotion, rather than reality.
Longing and nostalgia, then. Pictures can make people nostalgic for a moment they never lived. The light in an image can remind you of another place and time entirely that may set you off on your own chain of memories.
I used to be afraid that I didn’t have enough to say. But what my pictures do convey, is my joy in being alive, and the beauty in the everyday. I have come to believe that it is enough, for what is more universal than the desire to live?”
Claire Huish
Photographer - Claire Huish @clairehuish
Find the book www.clairehuish.co.uk