Greg Holland is a photographer raised in the North of England but has been in constant transit since he got a camera. Working between documentary and fashion photography, the camera enables him with an intimate view of humans and their expressions of personality and struggles. Shooting predominantly with film, his portraits and environmental details build a sometimes eerie tapestry of a time and place before it is forgotten or misremembered.
Flight-Intention Movement
I’ve been in transit for years, sometimes making my own decisions where to go and when to leave but sometimes the decisions have been out of my hands. In December 2017 my Australian visa was denied and I had no means to stay. The border patrol hounded me out of the country. I spent my last few weeks saying goodbye to people everyday; friends, colleagues, lovers.
I decided Mexico would be the best place to go hide out for a while. I arrived a couple of days before New Years and maintained a daily routine of walking everywhere in the city, riding the metro to outer neighbourhoods and walking back, heading out at night with my tripod – shooting through my crippling loneliness. I was at a major personal crossroads and I had a lot of bad days. Not sure of what would become of me or in which direction my life was heading in, I focused on the beautiful and the ugly in Mexico City, the struggle of a city growing in population while sinking into the lake bed it was built on, torn by an earthquake while bathed in beautiful light. I searched for these beautiful juxtapositions as a way of proving to myself that life will find it’s way and so too will I.
I tell people my time in Mexico was a personal honeymoon, at times it felt not like a journey you take with a loved one after you elope, but a journey you take whilst you’re mourning all that’s happened. Family members passed and friends took their lives, the bad news made it’s way to Mexico and I decided that people need people to survive and if I was to make it through I had to return to my family and friends. These photos are deeply personal, I was living through a personal hell and these moments were the only thing I had to hold on to.
To view more of Greg Holland’s work please visit his website.