Welcome to the first issue of Sam Talks Shit to the Voices in His Head and Then Shows It to Normal People. Field Notes (for marketing reasons).
The hotel was scenery. The laundrette was useful.
July was a little eventful.
It began with seven and a half hours of paying a real artist to repeatedly stab me. This was, somehow, the normal part of the month. Then things went sideways.
For reasons I won't go into here, somebody tried to force their way into my art. I protected it, lost safe access to my home, became homeless and kept making pictures anyway. They don't get naming rights in this story.
On the way into Bitton, I stopped to speak to a woman picking blackberries from a hedge.
She had worked through the lower branches and taken the fruit she could reach. Later, on my way back, I ate some of the larger berries growing higher up.
The taste took me straight back to being a kid. My sister and I used to pick blackberries and our nan would turn them into a pie. I hadn't thought about that for years. In the middle of everything else July had become, it was good to remember a time when the main purpose of finding food in a hedge was pudding.
Seven blackberries and an involuntary trip back to childhood.
I'd walked to Bitton because walking was free.
Fuel was tight. My phone and camera batteries needed charging. The car could do it, but running the engine used fuel, and I needed to keep enough to reach a petrol station when I had money again.
Homelessness involves calculations nobody should have to become good at. How much battery is left? Where can I get water? Can I wash my clothes tonight? Is there somewhere with a socket, and will using it mean buying something I can't afford? How long can one person stare at a charging percentage before it becomes a hobby?
Earlier in the month, the back seat of my car became a bed at night and a back seat again in the morning. I folded the bedding away because making the car look like a car felt important, even when nobody else knew or cared.
A bedroom at night, a back seat again by morning.
Then I moved into a tent.
The campsite gave me showers, toilets and somewhere I was allowed to exist. The tent offered more room than the car, which was a low bar but still a win. It also felt more exposed. The car could leave immediately. A tent stayed where I put it.
A temporary address without an address.
Clothes, water, a camping stove, a sleeping bag and camera equipment made it feel like mine. Work shoes sat beside trainers, with a spanner across the groundsheet because apparently I can't stop being a mechanic even when I'm off duty and homeless.
Even homelessness couldn’t get me off shift.
I started photographing those details.
One of the first photographs that made me think this could become a proper project was taken at a laundrette kiosk at a motorway services. There was a hotel nearby. I couldn't afford a room, but I could afford to wash my clothes outside under bright lights.
That was the picture: a row of machines in a kiosk, with the hotel acting as scenery for something I couldn't access.
The photographs grew from there. Bedding across the back seat. Mess tins in a communal sink. The tent through its mesh. My work shoes beside that spanner.
I called the project No Fixed Address.
I didn't want to stage anything or make the situation look worse. It didn't need help. I also didn't want to turn homelessness into a romantic creative retreat. There's nothing romantic about planning where to wash, charging equipment from a car or waking up because somebody has walked past the tent.
But it wasn't only misery either.
There were trees moving above me at night. Friends fed me and washed my clothes. A goose with a damaged wing I decided to name Goose Willis. People played music beside the tents. I had moments of freedom inside a situation I wouldn't have chosen.
Goose Willis on his way to make another Christmas movie.
Photography gave me something useful to do with all of it.
I can't solve housing with a photograph. I can notice how the washing machines look under fluorescent light and come away with something that didn't exist before. For a few minutes, my brain has a job other than running through the same problems.
The project also started moving beyond me.
Photographs from an earlier London shoot were published internationally. I'm now working to a commission from a national publication, writing an article about No Fixed Address that will be printed alongside a handful of my photographs. There's no confirmed date, although October currently seems likely.
A second major national publication has expressed interest. I've also spoken to an exhibition space that is monitoring the project as it progresses.
At the same time, I was still rationing fuel, carrying water and arranging my possessions inside a tent.
Both versions of my life were true.
I was homeless. I was also producing work that people wanted to publish, discuss and possibly show. Professionally, things were going suspiciously well. Everything else had become an admin-based escape room.
July also forced me to look at the amount of time I spend waiting to feel confident.
Near the end of the month, three people were playing music beside the tents. There was an upright bass, warm evening light and temporary homes in the foreground. I knew immediately that I wanted the photograph.
I also knew I didn't want to walk over and ask.
I sat there hoping confidence might arrive and take responsibility.
It didn't.
So I walked over anyway.
I explained that I was making a documentary project about living on campsites while homeless and asked whether I could photograph them. They said yes. I took some photos and left with an email address.
Nothing terrible happened. Nobody laughed. The ground didn't open.
Confidence arrived shortly after I stopped waiting for it.
By the final day of July, I'd sent the photographs to one of the musicians and used the portrait to complete a little challenge I'd been set earlier in the month. Apparently confidence is doing the thing before your brain has finished preparing its objections.
It wasn't a commission or a major career moment. It was a small ask beside a tent. It mattered because I made the encounter happen instead of waiting to be invited into it.
That's become the rule now. If something could improve the work, teach me something, introduce me to somebody useful or pay me, I ask. Other people are allowed to reject me. I don't need to save them the effort.
The same thinking has started changing what comes after No Fixed Address.
I began looking into Hungarian citizenship through my grandfather, who was born in Budapest and left after the 1956 uprising. Europe went from a vague fantasy to something that might be legally possible, provided I can survive the paperwork and learn more than greetings.
I also found a name for the project that could follow this one: No-Mad.
No Fixed Address is about movement forced on me. No-Mad could be about movement chosen by me. Photography, travel and making a life that isn't organised entirely around surviving the next problem.
It's still an idea, not a plan. I've learned not to confuse the two.
On the final day of July, the idea became slightly less abstract. I went to Dunraven Cliffs to make travel photographs, then edited them that evening into the beginnings of a proper travel portfolio. The dream is for somebody to pay me to go somewhere exotic while I pretend that counts as work.
Building a travel portfolio one photogenic campervan at a time
It wasn't a plane ticket or a new life, but it proved I could start building the next thing before the current one was finished.
The month began with forced movement. It ended with me going somewhere to see what photographs I could bring back.
Not quite exotic, but it’s a start.
The campsite chapter ended at the edge of August, but No Fixed Address isn't finished. The next photographs are carrying everything into a room and charging every battery at once because there are sockets and nobody expects me to buy a coffee first.
A room won't neatly finish the story, but it'll change it.
At the start of July, most things felt out of reach. Safety. Stability. A home. Recognition. Confidence. A future built around photography rather than fitted around it.
Some of those things are still out of reach.
Some are closer than they were.
And some turned out to be hanging from a hedge in Bitton.
Anyway, that's my rambling. If you made it this far, I apologise, and enjoy the rest of your day.
