Real

(this entry follows on from DEPTH).

Fashion has always been good at showing us somewhere else.

A house we don’t live in. A life with no interruptions. A version of ourselves just out of reach. The clothes are there, but what’s really being sold is the promise that buying them might move us a little closer.

I understand the appeal of aspiration. I’m just less interested in making it the centre of Mamnick.

The older I get, the more I want to use what is around us. The people, buildings and places that have shaped the work in the first place.

That might mean photographing a jacket in a Sheffield factory, among the machines and the people who know how things are made. It might mean a South Yorkshire bus stop, or the edge of a Sunday league football field. Places most of us pass without thinking twice.

They don’t need to stand in for somewhere more desirable. They deserve to be looked at in their own right.

For years, fashion has borrowed the appearance of ordinary life while removing almost everything ordinary from it. A factory becomes a backdrop. A street becomes an aesthetic. The people who belong there disappear from the picture.

I don’t want to do that. From the start, Mamnick has been about real stories and real places - If we photograph in these places, I want the work to carry some sense of them: their use, their weather, their particular light. The fact that life goes on there after we’ve packed the camera away.

Artificial Intelligence has made it possible to produce almost anything we can describe. That has made me think more carefully about the ones we choose to make. Where was this taken? Who was there? What happened just outside the frame? All that still means something.

More than ever, perhaps it's so important that we should show people what is real? 

There’s a phrase for working this close to home: hyperlocalism. It sounds more deliberate than it feels. Mostly it means going back, meeting people, noticing something you missed last time. A place you know well can still surprise you if you give it enough attention.

That was the thought behind DEPTH. You don’t have to keep looking further away to find something worth showing. You can go deeper into the place you already know.

Mamnick comes from Sheffield. The clothing is part of that, but so are the workshops, the cycling routes, the bus stops, the football pitches and the people we’ve come to know over the years. I want our imagery to make room for all of it.

There is enough here.

What do you think?

This Journal was never intended to be one-way.

If this piece resonated - or you disagree - leave a comment below.

Words and photos by Thom Barnett