What remains is in the memories, the lived experiences; how the passage of time slowly pulls away the veil of definition and clarity, in the landscapes and places we were once accustomed to. How your everyday street, your everyday lamp posts and rows of balconies start dissolving until they become foreign entities.

How landscapes that were once so full become grain, and those people that defined you become ghosts and silhouettes of the past. Black dots on a wash of greyness.

How the chair that once held you for hours at night goes back to being wood. Who does it hold now? Who is it supporting? The treason of the chair.

The bouquets of flowers that dried up and died before we became conscious that our hearts were drying up too.

A city that we start grieving. Once a home, now pushing you away. Streets and buildings become blurred lines the same way I mix up the years of my passing through them. How my city is not your city, because we live in different realities. I once thought I knew who I was. Now my memories mess with myself, and now on the road miles away from everything, crossing the arctic circle, the weather turns, and the once calm lakes become tormented rivers. Pacific skies become storms and the sizzling wind chills my bones. Digging and excavating. Have I ever known who I really am. It takes me thousands of miles for the curves of the road to become my meditative space. It takes the foreignness of the land for me to reconcile the foreignness I have with myself. Somehow I feel more at home on a foreign terrace surrounded by people I don’t understand. Where is home anyway. It takes me to be at home with myself to be at home anywhere. The grain of my memories merges with the blur of that language I don’t understand, and the dizziness that ensues helps me spiral with myself. In there I find my own words, my symbols and my archetypes. And in the debris, the fragments get sharper, their edges crisper. Shapes and forms assemble the same way those letters of an alphabet I don’t know waltz together, forming words that somehow hold meaning. In the shadow I pull the layers of me. Ripping off masks for authenticity to emerge, the way light shapes the dark. What does a mirror reflect when held in darkness?

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Puer to Senex is a work in progress - a multidisciplinary project documenting a solo van journey from the UK to Nordkapp, the northernmost point of Norway, and back. Weeks above the Arctic Circle, followed by a winter journey through France and Spain. It is simultaneously a literary manuscript in the psychogeographic tradition, a music album recorded in the field, a video series, and the body of analogue photography presented here. The project takes its name and psychological framework from the works of Carl Jung: the arc from Puer Aeternus, the eternal restless boy, idealistic, enchanted by freedom and possibility, toward Senex, the grounded man, who embodies structure, depth, patience, and integrity. The journey was not taken in spite of a personal rupture but because of one: a long relationship ended, a shared home dissolved, a city that had been home for years became suddenly foreign. The road was the only answer that made sense.

The selected photographs were shots on two lomography cameras: a Holga 120N and a Lomomatic 110. Lomography cameras can’t be fully controlled, and produce grain, light leaks, vignetting, double exposures. What comes back from the film is never quite what was in front of the lens; it’s something more permeable. This quality, traces rather than records, residue rather than document, is not incidental to the project: it’s the project’s method.

The shift between cameras across the sequence is intentional and structural. The Lomomatic 110, with its heavy grain and rectangular format, is the camera of the external world dissolving into memory: coastlines, cities, interiors, a life being left behind. The Holga 120N, with its square format and softer vignetting, is the camera of the inner journey: the road, the forest, the archetypes, the self emerging from darkness.