It is apt I am editing this interview here, sitting in a Bloomsbury hotel room after a hard day’s exploration. This is photographer Sarah McLean’s stomping ground – the city of London. In the years, before physically arriving here, it has been through her work I have gotten to know this place and have developed an appreciation for the details.
Featured in the Guardian and Time Out, amongst others, Sarah is an accomplished image-maker living in the South East. At only 27 years old she has amassed a thoughtful and striking body of work that stays with you for days, and even years. Thus it is my pleasure to present this discussion with her – thoughts on discovering photography, analogue film, travel and more.
CFS: How and when did you first get into photography? Is it something you’ve always been interested in?
SM: I have loved photographs my whole life, and growing up I had an entire wall of my bedroom covered from floor to ceiling in snaps or my friends, family, pets, favourite places… I discovered my dad’s old camera when I was about 14 and loaded a black and white film into it on a trip to New York. When I was about 19 I really started to find it interesting again. Digital point-and-shoots had become relatively affordable, and my dad bought one for the family – I instantly loved the immediacy of it and craved one of my own.
My parents eventually bought me a Canon Digital Ixus for my 21st birthday and I took it to Australia and New York that summer – and loved documenting every moment. It was around this time I re-found my dad’s camera and took it to Paris with me; where I started to experiment with exposure, depth of field etc.
That Christmas my boyfriend at the time bought me a beautiful Exakta SLR which then led me to buy the Canon I use these days, so I guess it is relatively recently that I’ve become interested in the kind of photography I’m doing now.
CFS: When it comes to taking pictures, you primarily use film… if not solely? What’s the attraction of analogue?
SM: I just feel film has such a richness of detail, texture, quality, and in colour that digital just can’t compete with. To be honest, I don’t really understand how digital cameras work, whereas knowing the chemical process that go into producing a photo is really inspiring and makes the photograph make sense to me.
“Film feels so messy and ripe with possibility.”
I suppose it is also an aesthetic thing, I’m not hugely fond of the clean, crisp quality of most digital photos – film feels so messy and ripe with possibility.
I also love that if you make a ‘mistake’ with film, it can yield the most wonderful, surprising results. With digital it’s pretty hard to make a mistake at all.
CFS: What inspires the subject and themes of your photography? It seems to me a lot of your work has a strong feeling of quietness and forgotten memories – what is it that interests you in that?
SM: It is only recently that I have begun to think about what my work is actually about: for many years I have found a particular aesthetic appealing but not really investigated why that is.
I suppose I look out for patterns and textures that are usually man-made, and love catching little signs of life in unexpected places. My landscapes are more interesting to me if there is a building involved! That’s also why there is often huge empty space in the pictures I take – I feel that space is exciting because there is usually something waiting to fill it.
What you say about quietness is certainly true – I do like finding moments that are still but suggest the possibility of more than that, of activity. I think it comes down to exploring how we live in the way that we do, and recording those things that others overlook, or imagine are irrelevant – they’re usually not, certainly not to me.
CFS: You are a seasoned traveler; what has been your favourite locale to shoot so far?
SM: Gosh, such a hard question! I always, always love going to New York, and have a massive obsession with the USA generally. It has such diverse and astounding landscapes, it’s always interesting and fills me with awe – I dream of visiting every single state.
However, my pictures tend to seek out the mundane aspects of life wherever I am – be it in China, Texas, Berlin or even my scummy area of London. The same things inspire me everywhere – how people live, and capturing those tiny, mostly miss-able moments.
SM: Ah, that project. I still have about 9 cameras to develop from the end of the year, and then there’s all the re-sizing etc. to put them online in the right format… I really enjoyed doing it, but giving it an online presence was tough and time-consuming.
The most valuable part of it for me was that it forced me to consider taking photographs every day, twice (sometimes more often!) and think about my environment at all times. I do have a big project in mind for this year, possibly in the summer, but I’m keeping quiet about it for now.
I would also really like to work on collaborations, and have spoken to two people whose work I hugely admire, Sarah Kane and Shannon Doubleday, so we shall see if they take off and how they go. I’ll let you know!
We can’t wait to see the results. In the meantime, check out the rest of Sarah’s beautiful photographs at www.sarahmclean.co.uk or explore her flickr. Thank you Sarah!
