These portraits are of individuals, including my own father, who have migrated to England by sea. Clearly migration can be an enriching and liberating experience but this work uses the sea and tide as metaphors, to consider migration’s inherent divisions of time, space and self. The photographs are composites, palimpsests made over a period spanning high water. Each person was photographed at the approaches to their port of arrival. Ebbing and flowing, connecting and dividing the sea represents the sometimes hidden confrontation between past, present and future and the battle between rootedness and movement.

The subjects’ stories, hinted at through the titles, reflect the confluence of the personal with grander narratives. They form a contingent group, built on connections of family, friends and neighbours. The work endeavours to consider the schisms of migration through an empathetic imagining of each individual’s narrative and eschew the geopolitical, demographic and the stereotype’s simultaneous recognition and disavowal of difference.

www.jamesrussellcant.com