A Collaboration, 2020

In this project, the photographer (Thom) attempts to collaborate with his younger self (Tom) as he rediscovers photos taken during his teenage years. The project, which is still ongoing, begins eleven years ago with photos taken when the photographer, aged twelve, received his first camera as a birthday present.

A Collaboration showcases the way young people first learn to interact and experiment with lens-based practices. The project presents photography from an entirely avocational perspective, a form of entertainment in which the shutter clicks indiscriminately, unhindered by stringent rules or training in the medium. The adolescent photographer, as an oblivious collaborator, is entirely unaware of how these photos would later be presented or reinterpreted. As such, the images unintentionally serve a documentary function, presenting life as seen through the eyes of a British teenager living in rural England. In this vein, A Collaboration documents young people literally at play; daily school life, family holidays and summers spent with friends are all detailed in this expedition into the photographer’s archive.

A sense of play is compounded by the intervention of the now adult photographer, who in approaching these photographs with a decade of experience, is able to experiment freely with the source material. Unrestricted by a carefree approach to the grainy, pixelated and blurred images, Corbishley is able to find joy and untapped potential from photos that his adolescent self would have had little appreciation for, ultimately giving purpose to and creating a narrative for images that were long since cast away on old SD cards and disused hard drives.