Tom Lucas is a documentary photographer based in Cambridge, UK. He holds a B.A. in photography from Norwich University of the Arts. His work focuses on landscape, portraiture, and narrative. The utilization of documentary images aims to raise questions about environmental and social awareness. He is currently working on an ongoing project working with a small village community in Central Sweden exploring cognitive and physical escape through means of social ritual.
Lines of Flight
Lines of flight started as an ongoing series of images studying different ideas of escape, closely linked to the local inhabitants of a remote village in central Sweden.
Social rituals are formed by community events which capture changing relationships within the community, via means of cognitive and physical movement.
A notion of different ways of life is discovered in the movement of the local inhabitants, which functions in close connection to the motions of nature and the seasons in which nature moves. An attempted escape from societal norms integrated with a way of living – making the landscape an active member of the community. Basic life is kept crucial in the village, in the form of mainstream western culture; phones, guns and automobiles. However unity is shown between the local people and nature via adopted social rituals, which centre around the preservation of their environment.
Cultures with close relationships to large landscapes are forming an escape, cognitively and physically, encouraging the adoption of an outsider perspective. They distance themselves from what is thought to be second nature in largely populated urban societies.
These images have begun to document changing relationships between community members (including non-human) over a large period of time. The seasonal, cyclical movement of the landscape, and the combined motion of the community members, as they participate in different social rituals together, offers a new understanding of escape.
The project consists of two sub-series named Winterö and North of Oktober, which document two seperate seasonal rituals over two years, within the community. Hunting in Autumn in North of Oktober, and an Island party in Winter in Winterö.
To view more of Tom Oliver Lucas’s work please visit his website.