The Yester years.

Here we are again—fast forward twenty years from when I had a Blogspot account and posted pictures with cryptic captions. It was my first creative outlet, long before Instagram (or god forbid, Flickr) was a thing. Facebook had just kicked off back then, the original home of “photo dumps”—and by that I mean 219 unedited, unapproved-by-friends batch uploads of your night out, your birthday, or just a RaNdom 2018 album. The unserious days, when we didn’t take photos—or ourselves—too seriously.

I’ve always been the girl with the camera. Probably quirkily exasperating at the time, but eventually people started asking if I could take their portrait, or saying “Give the camera to Emma” in group scenarios. Figuring out, something must have been going right.

My first camera came in the most memorable way: I was about seven, staring at a white-and-orange cow-print 35mm through a shop window in the early ’90s. My mother promised she’d buy it… if I stopped scratching my eczema.

Ok so metaphorically, I got the itch for photography instead. From that moment, I began capturing my little world, noticing details, giving shape to my silences and essentially playing with a more interesting toy that did real things .

In the early 2000s, Poundland sold disposable cameras—and you guessed it for a pound. I’d send them off in the post to be processed, sometimes waiting weeks for that glossy paper envelope to arrive. At 13, there was nothing more thrilling than having post and unwrapping those forgotten, impulsive, high-energy moments. Time travel in 5x4 prints. It was feeling of being able to transport back to relive the emotions. The funny, the sad, all relived.

Fast forward to getting a degree and figuring life in-between and roundabouts, its always been a way to express how I see the beauty of the world.