Roots & Wings
A year-long documentary portrait project following six students through their final year, shot one afternoon a month.
Roots & Wings began as a single commission for a school prospectus and turned into twelve visits over a year. Six students agreed to be photographed once a month, in whatever they were doing that afternoon, from the September they started their final year to the July they left.
The final set is 900 frames edited to sixty, sequenced by month, and the school now runs it as an exhibition rather than a brochure.
Keeping six teenagers interested in a project for a year, photographing minors in a school with everything that requires, and producing images consistent enough to sequence when they were made across four seasons and a dozen locations.
We fixed what we could and let everything else move: the same camera, the same lens, the same time of day, natural light only. Permissions were agreed once in writing at the start, with the students able to withdraw any frame at any point; two did, which is exactly the number that tells you the arrangement was real.
