After-life

I'm collating all the images of the pseudo-suicide spots I shot now for prints and to put up on my website. I've got a piece to write to accompany it and also to lay out in order for a short run book.

With all the places I visited, I could see in each why it was picked - some obvious because of background connections or popular history - but inherent in all was the despair of both selection and practice.
None were random places of moment or at least they didn't feel that way and as much as many suicides can travel far to fulfil self-believed necessity, these could well have been decided upon months, if not years or decades, before.

I've called the series After-life for the reason that the act of faking suicide is not to full-stop life totally - it is to put a painful parenthesis around the former and then place everything in the plan of what comes next.

Below are the first I've been working on and are from Beachy Head, East Sussex.
Info for the interested.

All change on the camera front

Must be the cold lifeless / lightless weather that forces the photographer into changing equipment when there's little else to do.
All the Pentax digital kit has gone - replaced with a Canon 5D. The arrival of the 5D Mark II has finally shifted the cost of full frame down to my kind of level......

The Mamiya RB67 has also gone, superceded in a different way by an old 1950s MPP 5x4 press camera. Some issues resolved on this and negatives now coming out of it something like the images seen going in.
A day in the presence of the UK Large Format Photography Group and Lancashire Monochrome helped with some of the theory. Thanks to all and if you visit their forums , advice is freely given.

Some of the images below are from that day, others from others but all out of the MPP.