Photographer L�onie Hampton watched for 12 years as her mother's new house was colonised by crates and newspapers. When the family finally began to unpack, she captured the strangely joyful process of sorting through the chaos
For 12 years after she moved home, Bron, mother of photographer L�onie Hampton, couldn't bring herself to unpack her boxes, so the family lived in one half of the house and the boxes in the other.
No one could sit in the sitting room or eat in the dining room because there were brown cardboard crates and plastic bin bags stacked up to the ceiling, filled with possessions from her first marriage. The way Bron explains it, the decision to leave the boxes undisturbed was the logical consequence of moving into a house that had no cupboards. Because there were no cupboards, there was nowhere to unpack things to, so leaving them in the boxes was the tidiest solution, particularly when the boxes became dusty, by which point the prospect of unpacking them began to disturb her.
"It alarmed me, the way that when you open a box you are creating chaos," she says. "I would open it up and I would feel weary. I didn't have the energy to deal with it."
Her daughter saw this paralysis as a part of her mother's obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), with which she has been struggling for almost 30 years. She made a deal with her mother: she would help her reclaim her home from the boxes, as long as she could record the process in photographs. Hampton's book, In The Shadow Of Things, charts a not entirely successful mission to shed the layers of belongings that were taking up so much mental and physical space. The photographs are annotated with transcripts of her mother, explaining why things never got done.
"I think one of the things that happens when you've been stressed by something is that you become indecisive," Bron says. "You're worried that if you make a decision, it's not going to be the right one, so you put it off and put it off, and then I couldn't make decisions about where to build the cupboards at all, so my possessions stayed in packing cases for, as it's turned out, 12 years."
Hampton realised her mother's condition was worsening when she was no longer able to hug her after a two-hour train journey from London. ("They would be wearing clothes that had been on public transport. I was seeing germs everywhere," Bron explains.) The surfaces in her mother's kitchen would be covered with clean laundry wrapped in sheets of newspaper, because Bron felt the clothes required protection from invisible dust. Another room upstairs was disappearing beneath layers of carefully laundered clothes, each item sandwiched between pieces of newspaper, so that eventually her mother could access only a few things near the top, which was all she wore for several years. New boxes would appear, storing rubber bands, corks, children's drawings or a hairclip, slightly broken, preserved for possible mending at a later stage.
"I think nostalgia comes into it a bit," Bron says. "If it is something that makes me happy, I find it incredibly hard to part with those memories." But the state of the house began to upset her grown-up daughters. "I think we all began to realise that this is how it would be for the rest of time and I would turn into Miss Havisham," she says.
Hampton, whose previous work focused on other people's families, decided four years ago to turn the lens on her own: on her mother and stepfather David, her sister, Domino, and her young brother, Jake, who has grown up happily alongside the boxes. She acknowledges that her need to take photographs is her own compulsion, an equally obsessive desire to hold on to memories.
Gradually they began to unpack, laying things on the grass outside where Bron says she hoped the "dust would blow away for ever". The photographs capture scenes of happy family life amid the bags and boxes, and of unexpected joy in the act of sorting out the chaos.
The idea was to publish when the house was cleared, but that hasn't happened. In the entrance hall, a chair has been pushed awkwardly in front of the door to the dining room, as a barrier, preventing entry. Inside, boxes remain in tall, ordered stacks, unwanted clothes hang in the window obscuring the light, cartons marked "children's presents" sit on crates labelled "general presents" opposite boxes containing cuckoo clocks, Christmas reindeer, old linen. The room smells clean, and there are pathways between the boxes, but it is order laced with chaos: old wrapping paper rests on sagging bin bags; framed pictures of plants are hidden behind the cartons.
Hampton believed her mother's OCD was triggered by stress and was sure the boxes were making her unhappy, which is why she wanted to help her restore order. Initially, she thought she could "annihilate" the OCD and its symptoms. "At the beginning I wanted to battle it," she says. "Now I've accepted it." Nonetheless, she hated the hidden nature of the condition, and wanted to display it in the photographs, to demonstrate that there was nothing shameful in it. Her mother took some persuading.
"I didn't want to talk about it to begin with," Bron says. "I don't like this 'me, me, me' stuff. You look around the world, you see all these afflictions, desperate poverty everywhere; in the great scheme of things, OCD is so minor. It's not cancer." Gradually, she came around: "If it helps others understand it, I don't mind talking about it."
In some ways, Bron likes her OCD. She finds hand-washing comforting; a therapeutic way of dealing with stress. "It's not helpful to try to stamp it out," she says. "It isn't harmful if it's mild."
These photographs are taken from In The Shadow Of Things, by L�onie Hampton, published by Contrasto at �29.95. To order a copy for �23.96, including UK mainland p&p, go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/may/21/family-obsessive-compulsive-disorder
No comments:
Post a Comment