Five dates anchor Paris-based photographer Ed Alcock’s Home, Sweet Home: 1 January 1973, when Britain joined the EU; 11 April 1974, when he was born in Norwich; April 2000, when he moved to France; 23 June 2016, when the UK voted for Brexit; and 24 June 2018, when he became French.
The cover of the New European, a newspaper founded in the weeks after the vote on Brexit, and the cover of Metro
An arresting meditation on ideas of personal and national identity in a time of flux, the project, part of the Circulations show of emerging European photography in Paris, evolved over time as Alcock wrestled with the meaning – and consequences – of the UK’s decision to leave the EU.
Alcock’s British passport (left) and a duplicate image with the words ‘European Union’ removed
“I couldn’t vote myself,” said the photographer, who moved to France in 2000. “But like all the 48%, I never imagined it would go the way it did. So I woke up on the morning of 24 June feeling pretty disappointed. Really angry, actually.”
‘It has begun ...’ reads graffiti on the wall of a disused cinema in Port Talbot, south Wales
A girl walks past Union Street in the village of Newcastleton. Residents of the Scottish Borders voted 58.5% to stay in the EU
Added to that was the dawning realisation that, having been a European all his life, he was about to be no more. “How was that possible?” he asked. “How could I stay European? By becoming French. But what did that mean, what were my feelings about that?”
The initial impetus came from a 10-day, 1,050-mile (1,700km) road trip Alcock undertook with a journalist from the French newspaper Le Monde in the immediate aftermath of the referendum, from Scotland to south-west England via Wales.
Paul Griffiths lives in Llangennech, south Wales. Griffiths, a steelworker at Tata Steel in Port Talbot, voted to leave the EU
“The idea was to listen to the voices that hadn’t been heard too much,” he said. “To avoid the big cities and photograph and speak to the people who hadn’t had too much contact with the media or the politicians. To try to understand, really.”
The exercise, classic documentary photography, was a success and Alcock repeated it, with a different Le Monde journalist, revisiting essentially the same towns and people, in the summers of 2017 and 2018. He plans to do so again this year.
A sign on the border between Scotland and England indicates the word ‘Englishtown’. Monica Coburn, right, from Carlisle, voted for Brexit
Then in 2018 Myop, the photographic agency he works with, suggested publishing a mini-magazine of his Brexit work. “I decided I wanted to play with the images a little, to publish more than just the straight pictures,” Alcock said.
That is when he alighted on a school textbook, published in 1959 for French students of English, that he had found some time before in a car boot sale. It offers a quirky postwar portrait of France’s neighbours across the Channel, for 15-year-olds.
A British teenager stands with his head in the garden hedge in front of his home. The background image, ‘Things Past’, is taken from a textbook for French college students published in the 1950s
“Immediately, the resonances sprang out,” he said. “This was a little book written at pretty much the time the EEC, the forerunner of the EU, was being created. Britain wasn’t even a part of it, but it was remarkable how much – and how little – has changed.”
Alcock photographed particularly striking pages from the book – chapter headings and phrases such as “Do they take it seriously?”, “Ruritania in danger of disappearing”, “The Black Country”, “Is this your passport?”, “Intelligence work before D-day” – and began juxtaposing them with pictures and portraits from his road trips.
Michael Goldsmith voted remain in the referendum and is furious with the result
“I love it when you pick up a secondhand book and someone’s photograph happens to fall out,” he said. “The idea was for these unnamed Britons, after the vote for Brexit, to be something like that – almost fictionalised characters. And to leave it to the viewer to decide what they think about Britain and the British.”
The result is startling: Alcock’s straightforward, powerful portraits (much of his work, these days, is portraits), landscapes, objects and still lifes from contemporary Brexit Britain, juxtaposed with unexpected texts that – while quite plainly from another era altogether – connect forcefully to the present.
Tom Manley, 20, is a resident of Bradford in West Yorkshire. He voted to remain in the EU
He has his favourites, including Tom, a shaven-headed lad from Bradford with a bloodied nose who, Alcock said, he was sure had voted for Brexit. “I was completely wrong,” he said. “But his father had, and they weren’t speaking. That was important, and fitting, because there’s so much … misunderstanding, so many fractures, in Brexit.”
The final element in Home, Sweet Home is Alcock’s own story of becoming French, a feat he finally accomplished last summer. Portraits of his mother and great-grandmother are superimposed on 19th- and early 20th-century texts about France’s national identity.
A portrait of Sheila Armstrong, Alcock’s mother, and right, his great-grandmother. Alcock poses the question in this series: if he must become French to remain European, will these ancestors have to become Gauls?
“My great-grandmother was born in 1882,” he said, “the year a French historian, Ernest Renan, first put forward the idea that the true ancestors of the French were the Gauls. It’s an idea with currency now on the right and the far right – some kind of ethnic French identity denied to immigrants.”
And that, Alcock said, “set off a whole lot of other questions. What does becoming French truly entail, can I really ever be French … What, I suppose, does nationality even mean?” His attempts at a photographic answer are on show at the Cent Quatre, a cultural space in eastern Paris, until the end of June.
Ron Holmes, 75, who lives in Llangennech, south Wales, voted to leave the EU
