Bach: A Family Album
Ongoing series. Sandbach, south Cheshire.
Bach is a composite of archival and documentary photographs centred around my home town, Sandbach in south Cheshire.
Sandbach is a former Elizabethan market town. Once home of the now-defunct Foden and ERF lorry manufacturers - a major employer in the town until their closure in the late 1990s - the town's limited fame derives from this fact, from 12-times National Brass Band Championship winners the Foden's Band, the ancient Saxon Sandbach Crosses and Sandbach Services on the M6 motorway, which are consistently rated the worst in the UK (and sometimes Europe). A number of the town's pubs - many former coaching inns - are listed. Two of its more famous sons, the Gibbons brothers, now write Alan Partridge books and scripts for Steve Coogan.
The etymology of Sandbach is derived from the Anglo-Saxon sand bæce, meaning "sand stream" or "sand valley". It has held various names, being known in official records as Sanbec in 1086, Sondbache (also Sondebache) in 1260, and Sandbitch in the 17–18th Centuries.
The series takes a linguistic cue from the phonetic similarity between 'bach' and 'back', an acknowledgement of the discomforting yet indefinable distance between past and present, familiarity and foreignness, constancy and change. Aside from the personal photographs, many of the sites depicted hold personal significance, though these are concealed behind the indifferent surfaces of the present.
Sandbach is the place some of us feel compelled to escape but must return to in moments of comfort or crisis. It is simultaneously a detailed, multi-layered study of the ambiguous space where affection and antipathy meet, and an affectionate homage to my parents and our extended family. Most of the contemporary photographs were taken using a 35mm camera handed down from my father. When film became prohibitively expensive to develop, I switched to digital.
