I’ve been thinking a lot about identity and belonging recently.

Identity has always been important in societies. It’s long been a crucial way for individuals to understand each other, to read each other as “them" or “us”, friend or foe. A way of taking chaos, the unknown, the dangerous and turning the world into a legible, ordered and safe place, where you know where and with whom you belong.

Many of us now are pretty lucky to lead varied lives, with careers, interests, hobbies and loves that change over our lifetimes. And many of us are no longer defined by the job we do, or the community in which we live.

But are we really free to present this variety?

Because at the same time as we’re experiencing this range of experiences, as we diversify, we also live in a world where, especially with social media, we are asked to define, to distil who we are and present a version of ourselves that fits into neat little boxes of identity.

Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation, Marseilles, France, 2009 or 2010.

Instagram’s 150 character limit on our biographies is such a case in point. In a short space we are asked to explain who we are. If, like me, you are lucky enough to be an ambassador for an organisation, that role title alone fills most of the space, leaving very little space left to explain what else you might be about.

So are we at risk of reducing ourselves to fit in these boxes?

Or, are we merely choosing which self to present? The sociologist Erving Goffman proposed a theory where individuals present themselves differently depending on who they think will be responding to them, something known as “impression management”. Can you think of a better modern example of impression management than social media? We curate. We choose what goes out there and how it looks, but we are not immune to feedback, to the insidious creep of comparison. It’s hard not to start to change what we put out there, to tailor who we present ourselves as being in order to be accepted by the groups we wish to belong to, those we want to be liked by, rather than put out a true expression of who we are. (I am making generalisations here. I do, of course know of some very wholly authentic profiles out there and for those I am grateful.)

I am no stranger to this.

Scroll back to my early Instagram photos and you will see hazy photos of my cat on a blanket, or solo meals I had prepared. Fast forward a few years and it becomes all about the camping, the mountains, the adventures, all “shot on an iPhone”. More recently, as I’ve rediscovered my love of photography, the images of landscapes and nature have become more artistic, carefully chosen rather than uploaded at 11pm after a glass of wine. They’re accompanied by posts I have written and rewritten, trying painfully to tread the fine line between honesty and truth, and overshare and being “too much”.

These are not necessarily bad things. I have been working on my photographic craft for a while, learning, growing, and I’m proud of the journey, my evolution, and of the images themselves. And to have a specialism is also no bad thing, in fact it’s often what we spend our careers trying to achieve, and perhaps it’s only natural that the more I specialise and the more I share that specialism, the more narrow my profile becomes.

Bullet holes in a wall, Mostar, Bosnia, 2016.

But as I go further down my photographic path, as it weaves in and out of the outdoors world, and especially in the context of my next steps, I find myself questioning

What self am I presenting to the world?

A large part of why I started this website was to be able to showcase a broader range of my images than perhaps fit with the current direction of my Instagram profile. But if most people encounter my images via social media, and if that is my main public and social platform, am I not still reducing and distilling myself into a neat package, even if it’s one of my own choosing and curating?

I also find myself asking what communities do I feel I belong to, and how does what I’m putting out there relate to those communities? We all seek belonging. The safety and comfort of a group who gets us, who understands what we’re about is immensely powerful. It’s perhaps no surprise that the place I feel most at home is in the outdoors community. There was a line in the Kendal Mountain Festival’s 2019 trailer asking why everyone at the festival is wearing the same kind of coat. In every showing of that trailer, that line always elicited a laugh. But it was a safe laugh, knowing that we all got the joke, we all had the coat, we all belonged. It was an in joke for the outdoors community. And I was definitely part of that crowd laughing. But, in the same way I’m questioning what identity am I presenting to the world, I wonder if I’m restricting my communication with and participation in other communities if the self I present is too focussed on one activity, on one identity.

So, let’s draw the lens back a bit, widen the view.

I am a photographer, yes. But I have many other identities and my photography actually reflects much more about me than I suspect everyone knows.

Amanda Levete’s Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (MAAT), Lisbon, Portugal, 2018.

Did you know, for example, that I have spent most of my professional and academic career obsessed with space? No, not the NASA kind, the architectural kind. I’ve probably watched every episode of Grand Designs there is. I know exactly what my own self build would look like. I’ve been known to cry at beautiful buildings when I’ve been in them. I’ve worked with architects and planners, am a trained Environmental Psychologist and had my own consultancy. I’ve spent my career trying to understand, encourage and build beautiful spaces that work well. Architects feature just as much on my roll call of inspiration as those summiting new peaks.

The built environment is just as important to me as the natural one.

I think this lifelong passion for space informs my photographer’s eye all the time. I’ve been told my images often show patterns or repeating lines and motifs. But one of the first things I do is to look for structure and form in my images, creating an architectural framework from whatever is in view. It could be using a tree to provide strong vertical movement or frosty wooden boards on a dock to segment the image into classical horizontal thirds. Architecture is always around, even in the natural environment, you just have to look for it.

I’m also quite old school.

While I do love a good hipster coffee shop and currently drink Oatly Barista in my coffee, I don’t think you could call me trendy. I listen to jazz, folk and classical music, anything with a banjo or mandolin lights me right up. My favourite books are early 20th century American classics. I knit, play board games and try and make things out of wood every now and then.

This also impacts on my photography. Despite currently shooting on a mirrorless Four Thirds Olympus camera, I’m predominantly drawn to older technology. While my A-Level classmates were fighting with each other to use the one license of Adobe Photoshop our college had, I was happily messing around with my 1930s medium format twin lens reflex Rolleiflex camera. I’ve recently inherited my late father’s Leica from the 1940s, and I’m currently waiting to see the results of my first roll of film for a decade. The benefits of digital photography are huge, and I am not about to hang up my Olympus, but

the analogue world will always have more depth, more draw and more soul for me.

This old-school approach probably affects my gaze more than the medium. Learning photography as I did in a mostly pre-digital way, I was practising the same skills as some of the classical greats of the photography world. The black and white photographs of Eugène Atget, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Bernd and Hilla Becher and my favourite Walker Evans are far more of an influence today than some of the contemporary photographers I also admire. The composition, the tones, the contrasts in my shots are all born from a love of images taken at a time when you couldn’t rely on colour to bring a third dimension, where the bare bones of the image were what made it sing or not.

Most people when asked what country they would most associate with me would say in an instant Sweden. It’s no secret that I’ve totally fallen in love with the Scandi country, its mountains, the Swedes’ love of the nature and of course cinnamon buns.

But actually, the country I’ve had the longest and deepest relationship with is France.

My mother and father were teachers and professors of French, it was spoken around the house with an ease and frequency that has made me somewhat proficient in it although generally not used now beyond ordering croissants and beers. But French culture, of which my father was a professor and an expert, floods through my life and in my blood. The music, the food, the literature but above all else the photographers and artists who come from France are without a doubt those that I have the closest knowledge of and admiration for. I see their influences in my work as frequently as I speak to my cat in French (to clarify, this is often).

French doorways and ghost signs, somewhere in France, probably shot in 2014.

I’m also pretty humorous, in the sense that I see the humour in things rather than people find me funny (well, there’s probably some of that too). I’m a pretty strong and determined person, and as a lot of my photographs are often taken in the wet, the cold and usually whilst also carrying a lot of kit, they’re also representative of this strength. I think I’m not someone to shy away from difficult things, and although no-one likes criticism, even the act of sharing my photography in a world where criticism is quickly and easily thrown around is pretty brave.

Walker Evans said that “the secret to photography is the camera takes on the character and personality of the handler”.

While I know how my whole personality is reflected in my photographs, I think that in a desire to fit in with certain communities and in a concerted effort to demonstrate a specialism, I’ve been choosing too carefully what I present to the world, especially on social media. So I’m going to make an effort from now to widen the view, present more of my different identities in photographs of a wider range of subjects,

because I am many things, interested, informed and inspired by many things and people and places, and I do and can belong to many.

On identity and belonging

On developing and enlarging