Ippdipp

Photographs taken by my family, spanning from the 1960’s to the 1990’s, alongside photographs taken in my grandmothers home as i’ve learnt about and continue to navigate my own families history. 

The photos selected are from a large body of images that I started to explore in the beginning of 2015. As I waded through thousands of images whilst living with my grandmother, I began to learn the intricacies of our family and idiosyncrasies that ran alongside it.

The biggest vein within this project is my father. 25 years ago my Grandfather was a victim to fraud and lost everything he had worked very hard for - £40,000, the entitlement to his house and was declared bankrupt. My Father at the age of 22, secretively bought his parents house to keep his fathers bankruptcy a secret from him until his death. Through many highly illegal actions, he kept a family intact. Paying two mortgages (one being his parents which he still pays to this day), getting married, having a child (me), working for a major bank, sneakily acquiring means of income - and somehow being a mastermind of putting everyone and everything on his back.

To this day I am close to my Dad but his quietness about this subject causes him to be somewhat of enigma to me. These photos are only a few that show the day to day lives of my family as they struggled to hide my Grandfathers legal and money issues that he never knew of.