Matthew Finn
Matthew Finn (b. 1971 UK) explores personal relationships both within the corpus of the family as well as the wider stage of personal relationships through long-term photographic projects. With no commercial constraints or deadlines, Finn cultivates a working practice of an auteur, in charge of all the elements of the work where the craft of the print and the process as a whole are equally important. Finn continues to make significant long-term bodies of work including his series of portraits of students, which commenced in the early 1990s (Finn is a senior photography lecturer), and durational bodies of work that focus on the province of family life and close relationships.
Finn’s most notable works include the thirty-one-year process of making intimate, domestic portraits of his mother and the twenty-eight years he documented his relationship with his uncle. Today Finn collaborates with family members as he pursues the universal themes of love, loss, bereavement and intimacy. Through these current and completed projects Matthew Finn has expanded the frontiers of documentary photography, bringing a new and deeply psychological reality to the genre.
He is the recipient of the Jerwood/Photoworks Award 2015 and has published 2 monographs; Mother (Dewi Lewis, 2017) and School of Art (Stanley/Barker, 2019)
Interview by Dana Stirling
How did you first discover your passion for photography, and what led you to use it as a medium to document your life?
It came accidentally. I’d experimented with graphic design but realised early on I didn't have the patience for it, this was pre computers, so everything was done by hand. I got into photography because my father owned Leica cameras, not because he was a photographer but a conman but understood the con. He could impress people with certain cameras. I used to look into camera shop windows and could never understand why second-hand Leica's cost so much more than the other cameras. My uncle bought me an Olympus OM 20 and I just started photographing what was in front of me, which was them. I was 16 years old and hooked immediately.
What initially motivated you to start taking photographs of your mother, and how did this practice evolve for you over the years?
Like I stated it was because they were there. I had little knowledge of what a camera could do and new nothing about techniques and controls, so I was a nervous starter. It seemed a natural and risk-free subject that would not say no. I would get my mother to go back to the shop to ask the people in the processing place why my film came out blank. That happened a lot at first until I started reading Amateur Photographer magazine and figured out what the actual controls did on the camera. The idea of my mother as a continued subject just came out of habit like most things. She was available to photograph every day until I left for college, so I just made images around the home and when she went out for a drink with her sisters, and I tagged along with a camera and a few rolls of Ilford HP5. It was never a project in my mind for about the first 4 years. It was just a routine without thinking about the actual images much.
How does your relationship with your father, who was absent from both your life and your photographs, influence the significance of this project for you?
Only really after he passed away when I was 21 in 1994 that the project became something important, and I realised what it meant to me and my mother. I had seen how he treated my mum, never turning up for dates out, failing on promises to buy me things for my birthday, so my uncle would step in and buy me something. He once threatened to set his dog on my mum unless she made him a cup of tea. The dog was a Chinese Chow Chow and very powerful. He was only constant in how bad he was. LOL. He was predictable in that he would never do what he said, and I think after he passed it was a blessing. I refused to go see him in the hospital before he died. My mother did truly love him. As they say, love is blind. Sad really.
How did discovering your father’s other families impact your understanding of your own family history and identity?
It was a shock the night before the funeral I’d come home from a few drinks with friends, my mother sat in her chair, cigarette in hand with the stubs of many cigs in the ashtray next to her looking nervous as she said I have something to tell you. She went on in the next 30 minutes to discuss how at the funeral the following day I would meet all these half brothers and sisters that I had never heard of before. At the funeral i did indeed meet many but not all of them, we went for drinks, and later in the evening we shared our family albums. They all included my father with him in with the family he was with at the time. The same locations. Where my mother once stood, she and I had been replaced by another woman with other children in my place. It was very strange to see photographs where my own personal history seemed a lie. I’d never really had a family archive. I never knew my grandparent's and had no images of them together or my granddad except of my grandmother, who worked in the kitchens at a local school. My mother or Uncle never owned a camera, so we did not have a massive family album and as they were very poor growing up the idea of an extensive album was beyond their abilities or interest. I guess my history is behind the camera. Hopefully my photographs have become a type of album on what people looked like at that moment in time.
You mention that although your father isn't physically present in the photographs (or in your life), his absence still haunts the images. Could you elaborate on how his presence is felt through these photographs despite his physical absence?
Really through what I have said before – The project was about what he did not provide for my mother and me. - Love, so I filled in the gaps as best I could and that was to make images. To be the person he wasn't in my mother's life. To always be there. Photography seemed the perfect vehicle for this.
In what ways did your role as a photographer and your mother’s role as a subject shape your relationship and your interactions?
It was everything. Photography was our medium, our life together as adults. I’d started photographing my mother at 16 and only stopped 31 years later when she passed away. It allowed us to be in each other's company without it being awkward, photography took the place of questions, so we didn't speak much, and my mum never really asked what i was doing in life, she left that to her brother, my uncle. My mother never really had much to give except her love and time and what more can a son or photographer ask for. Priceless.
What insights can you share about your mother’s involvement in her own portrayal and her awareness of the photographic process?
My mother knew nothing about art, photography or anything associated with it and never showed any interest in looking at the images except at Christmas when I would show them to her, and her sisters and they would have a real laugh at how bad my mother would look in them. Though she became very aware of what the camera could do and what images did over the course of the project. She would say – Not any closer, not this side. She became aware of which was her best side, she understood quality of light and maybe what i was trying to do by going in close. I liked to think of this collaboration as a dance where she was the Teacher and me the pupil.
How did your mother’s mixed dementia impact your photographic collaboration and your relationship with her?
It changed everything overnight. It was no longer a collaboration. I became a career, feeding her, which is an unnerving and upsetting thing to have to do. I’d go and visit my mum in the nursing home and see that the carers had made her up and done her hair. It was something out of a nightmare Disney world. My mother would have hated it. She didn't like being touched and cut her own hair for the last 30 years of her life. It was very difficult to keep making the images, but I’d had conversations with editors and other photographers who said I had to continue as it was part of the story. I do remember before really showing the work. A picture editor asked me if I was prepared to give my mother up – showing the work and sharing the story was about sharing my mother. I remember thinking back to that and it made it easier to continue taking the pictures. It was no longer my mother; it was about sharing the brutal condition that millions of people face. To give a face to the illness.
What does your work reveal about the role of photography in capturing and preserving family history and personal relationships?
For me it is what Photography is good at. I did not think it was possible to make this work and find an audience, there were so few examples at the time in British photography of personal images within the gallery context. I was making this work before Billingham or Paddy Summerfield and many others who we now recognise who work within this genre. I was obsessed with a program I would watch with my mother and uncle. It was called 7up and it became my bible for making personal work and telling stories of normal non famous people. Every 7 years a group of people aged 7, then 14, then 21, then 28 etc would be documented throughout their lives both good and bad. It got me thinking about the everyday and more importantly duration. You need time to tell a real story.
How does using black and white photography contribute to the emotional depth and narrative of your work? What does this choice reveal about your approach to documenting your mother?
I started with black and white because all the photographers at the time I loved worked in Black and White, Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand, Emmett Gowin so it just seemed the thing to do. My Uncle had built me a darkroom in the garage so I could process and make my own prints in black and white, so it continued from that. I think if I had made the work in colour, it would still have worked. Look at the amazing work made by Richard Billingham or Nick Waplington or David Moore. I just liked using black and white and I was interested in formalism, very unfashionable these days but it allowed me to focus on the content and context of the work without distraction form colour. Also, the house was shocking, the paint and wallpaper schemes, the lack of re – modernising. I did not want the focus of the project to be on the fashions and ideas around taste. I wanted it to be about how a person lives in a specific space over time. About life and death, about ageing and the passing of time. Thats what interests me. Life and mortality. All the happy stuff.
What do you hope viewers take away from your photographs, and how do you want your work to impact their understanding of family and personal history?
You can never know what a person will get from the images. I try and take them on a journey, not a comfortable journey but one about life and death. I decided that I would have to somehow commercialise the work for it to be placed within the area and the best way for me to do that was to talk about the work through my life and experiences in making this project. People often walk out of my talks halfway through. It’s tough, I don't hold back. I discuss life. Like my mum said – I like the images of when I’m young. Nobody wants to be reminded of what comes after. I don't mind discussing that.
Can you share any challenges you faced while creating this project and how you overcame them?
Money. Shooting well over a thousand rolls of film and year and printing on high-end fibre papers costs serious amounts of money especially for years when you can't even see if there is any value in the project. It was 25 years before i decided to show it and I had no idea if anybody would be interested but you find the cash and you make it work because you believe in it. You must. Otherwise, what would be the point. Also, you give a little bit more of your soul each time you write or talk about the work, it can be draining. I’m not sure it is good for my mental health, but I have used the work as a platform to talk about many issues that I guess were bubbling under the surface. I think with any project the challenge is to believe in it and keep going. The best thing to do is show the work early, discuss it with photographers and friends and don’t sit on it under the bed for 25 years. Lol
