In A Foreign Field
2010
In July 2010 I travelled with friends to the Festival Internacional de Benicàssim (FIB) on Spain’s east coast – a “Mediterranean Glastonbury” built almost entirely for British festival-goers. It was my third time there and the first when I felt older than the crowd around me.
By then, the site had changed. What had once felt like a chaotic seaside festival had evolved into something closer to a low-security prison camp for British youth with high perimeter fences, watchtowers, checkpoints, and an entire landscape organised around branded alcohol. To the teenagers and twenty-somethings around us, this architecture of control and consumption seemed completely normal.
In a Foreign Field belongs to the last period when I still used my own camera as a way to test what I was seeing, and the photographs sit somewhere between holiday snapshots and social document: a portrait of a temporary British colony abroad, and a record of my own unease inside a festival that seemed to be built more around control and consumption than any real sense of freedom.
By then, the site had changed. What had once felt like a chaotic seaside festival had evolved into something closer to a low-security prison camp for British youth with high perimeter fences, watchtowers, checkpoints, and an entire landscape organised around branded alcohol. To the teenagers and twenty-somethings around us, this architecture of control and consumption seemed completely normal.
In a Foreign Field belongs to the last period when I still used my own camera as a way to test what I was seeing, and the photographs sit somewhere between holiday snapshots and social document: a portrait of a temporary British colony abroad, and a record of my own unease inside a festival that seemed to be built more around control and consumption than any real sense of freedom.
