Finding Subjects in Familiar Sights – by Chris Illing

It’s December the 23. 2018. Midnight. I’m standing in the bathroom of my parents house brushing my teeth. It felt like nothing had changed since my childhood. Everything as usual. I turn away from the sink to the bathtub. The same boiler, the same flagging, the same shower head. Since I can remember.

But suddenly something appears to be different. All at once, I perceive this situation differently. I turn around again. The green chair in the corner. Since always in the same place. Nothing extraordinary. But also here: All at once, this object so familiar with me appears interesting. What triggered this change in me?

I get my Mamiya 6, loaded with an expired Portra 400. Not the best film for interior shots in dim lighting conditions. Yet through the central shutter in the lens and the missing mirror of the rangefinder I manage to handhold 1/8s. What will the photos show me when they are developed?

In the next days I roam our house and the surrounding area. Searching unconsciously.
I’m successful: My parent’s bedroom. Here too – this standstill. The pictures on the wall, my mother’s alarm clock. Everything just as I saw it as a child.

My search continues. My father’s office. Entering the room is like a journey through time. The curtains, the beautiful mess, the electric typewriter that my father still uses from time to time. I notice that the desk has never been free. Since i can remember.

I find these places around our house, too. Places that remind me on my childhood. Because they have often changed little or not at all. Because they spark this feeling of familiarity in me.

The winter forest in which we played. The flood in front of our house or the tree into which we nailed our first tree house. Through photography I try to make this feeling tangible.

The finished images reflect these moments very well. The calm, the banal – but also: intimacy. What is left from growing up in your parents’ house? It seems to me that my parents’ house and the surroundings act as a mirror for myself, as a symbol for everything that has made us what we are now. Like a portal to my own adolescence.