Post by Tom Hill

Image 96 / 365. My grandmother’s combs on her bathroom window ledge. Part of the ‘Home is So Sad’ series 1999-2000. When my grandmother had to go into an old people’s home in 1999 I photographed the interior of her house using my old Blad 500c on VPS and VPL Fuji C41 negative film. There were dozens of very ‘intimate’ images, contents of drawers, wardrobes of clothes, crumpled bed covers and the like. The volume of work was a right barrel of laughs, based on the poem ‘Home is So Sad’ by Philip Larkin. I still find it difficult to look at some of the images now, this one included. I don’t find it sad because I miss my grandmother – quite the reverse, she was as much fun as a parking ticket and as venomous as a cobra. I miss her like having a hole in the head. However, what I find profoundly depressing is that anyone could live such a life as she did; her 1970’s house virtually unchanged since the day her and my grandfather moved in. It was a new build – by Fryers Construction in Derby around 1975. Considered then to be the epitome of modern living. Unfortunately, my gran treated her husband so badly that he just stayed at work virtually 12 hours per day, six days per week, so the house never ‘moved with the times’. I suppose the whole ethos behind the body of work, and its nomenclature, is the sadness of a life so squandered with (as I can remember) little but petty sniping, the same food almost every day – pork chop, boiled potatoes, cabbage and gravy) – and the rest of the time her sitting on a garish green Draylon sofa glued to Crossroads, Coronation Street and daytime quizzes. She often slagged off people she knew (or didn’t) in the community – “There’s an Asian man moved in down the road – but I’ll say one thing for ‘im – ‘e keeps ‘is Garden nice…” Or it would be some newsreader or quiz show host - “ ’is teeth aren’t straight, you’d think the telly people would make ‘im get ‘em fixed…” God knows, her presence was exhausting. Unfortunately digital compression takes away the tangible nature of this shot, the hair caught in the teeth of the comb, the scattered bits of dirt on the yellow tiles. The original 10” print on lustre paper is quite a thing to see, I can’t help but run my finger across to try to ‘feel’ the dirt and dust on the surfaces. Anyway, that’s cheered me up. I’ll post a jokey one tomorrow, I promise! #derby #1970’s #hasselblad #interiorphotography #filmphotography #fujifilm #PhilipLarkin