People - Charlotte Bland

25 Jan

Home - this word or idea has become an intense load of thoughts, emotions and physicality over the last few months. Not just a place of refuge, but now a place of work, schooling and domesticity. All lived with an intensity that most of us have never experienced before.

Many of us have previously and purposefully separated work and home - now we have no choice and this can be hard. We have combined cooking with homework and zoom calls with a need to bake, garden - or rebelling by doing nothing at all. We will change and our homes and connection to them will change forever. Our new enforced bond to our homes has sometimes felt normal and others - well - we all know it has felt overwhelming.

I have always loved Charlotte Bland’s images of home. Deeply personal moments of what is really quite normal, carefully and lovingly presented as sensory moments - cooking and cats, blossom and shadows, nooks and suppers. They offer not a shopping list of things - but a much more beautiful menu of living.

As a photographer, Charlotte has always used her home as a backdrop, container or platform to make what she shoots connect with us at a much more emotive level. It is wonderful then, that she has been able to shoot her own home as a self PORTRAIT.

I hope you enjoy.

“My career has absolutely been defined by my homes, I’m fascinated by what makes a house a home and will always want to photograph domestic objects and scenes to try to figure this out. ”

I grew up by the sea in a small town in Devon, in a house that was a life-long project. My dad was an architect and it was a very creative but ever-evolving home. He designed beautiful spaces for clients, often converting utilitarian structures like water towers and small reservoirs into residential dwellings that were very special while trying to find the energy to work on his own home in his spare time. After giving so much of his creativity and energy to other projects this was hard.

He was a perfectionist with a limited budget, so if something needed fixing or decorating he taught himself how to do it. It took a long time – 40 years on from our moving in, some of those jobs still remain unfinished! We lived up the lane from the beach where we had a small beach hut that was the perfect excuse to abandon DIY in the summer months and decamp to swim and barbecue instead.

One of my favourite childhood chores was collecting driftwood on the beach for those barbecues; my mum would dig a hole in the pebbles and make a driftwood fire to cook over, using an old oven shelf as a grill. My love for collecting things like driftwood and pebbles is still strong today, I have little piles of them around my house and in the garden - I love the pale, worn tones and textures and these colours are throughout the house in the paintwork and textiles.

“My love for collecting things like driftwood and pebbles is still strong today, I have little piles of them around my house and in the garden - I love the pale, worn tones and textures and these colours are throughout the house in the paintwork and textiles.”

Growing up with creative parents definitely shaped my view from a very young age. I was lucky to have art materials on tap and parents who were interested in, and excited by, art and design, and wanted my sister and I to be as excited by it as they were.

They also made their home together in the 70s, which was such a pivotal time for interiors in the UK. Suffice it to say Terence Conran was a big influence on our home; I still think about the beige corduroy Habitat sofa of my early childhood that my parents got rid of years later when it wore out. It was perfect and I would love to have it in my home now. As a child I read every Conran book, interiors magazine and interiors article in the Sunday supplements that I could get my hands on and made loads of scrapbooks with pictures of rooms and objects that inspired me.

Had Pinterest been around during my childhood I’d have spent my life on it. I did a degree in History of Art but always sought out domestic environments in the art that I studied, writing my dissertation on the home of the Swedish artist Carl Larsson, exploring how his home and the objects in it influenced his artwork.

My parents’ love of simple, natural materials and mending where possible rather than replacing has had a big influence on how I live.

I’ve also studied traditional furniture upholstery for the last 15 years, learning how to bring old chairs back to life - but I definitely reacted against the unfinished aspects of our home by creating quite minimal, spare spaces for myself. Something different to my parents, but definitely formed from my childhood influences.

I now live in Dulwich in south east London where my boyfriend Matt and I rent a little terraced house on a quiet street.

We’ve lived in south London for years, previously in Waterloo and Battersea, and didn’t set out to live specifically where we do now but the house was ideal for us. We found it six years ago when Matt had just set up a business and we were looking for a long-term rental to see us through whatever the next few years brought but also somewhere that was our kind of home; we were so lucky to find it.

The first time I walked into the house I knew we had to live there – the light was fantastic and it had a really good feel about it. I walked through the calm, well thought-out rooms to the back garden, which was a complete contrast; densely planted as a traditional cottage garden, a little wild with high summer growth, climbing roses and fruit trees. I was so drawn to it, within days we’d arranged to move in.

“My biggest love is to shoot everyday life, something I’ve done ever since I got my first camera when I was five.
I feel very lucky that I’m able to incorporate this in my photography work, shooting the things we use every day against a domestic backdrop. ”

I work from home a lot and being in my home is hugely important to me creatively. My biggest love is to shoot everyday life, something I’ve done ever since I got my first camera when I was five. I feel very lucky that I’m able to incorporate this in my photography work, shooting the things we use every day against a domestic backdrop.

I often shoot cookbooks in my home like this, with minimal external props and working with a small team in my little kitchen, which has fantastic, distinctive light. All the cooking, styling and photos are created in situ.

The light in the house is a big part of my work; it tracks round and creates strong shadows that change throughout the day. I spend a lot of time here, so I know how the light moves and behaves inside out, and how I can use it in my photos, both for clients and in recording our everyday life.

I often shoot the same views at different times of day throughout the year. I feel really lucky that the house keeps inspiring me to record how different the same thing can look depending on how high the sun is in the sky.

There is also a cherry tree on the street at the front which is perfectly framed in our bedroom windows. When the blossom is out the windows frame a bonkers pink floral view. I’ve photographed it every year, trying to capture the process from bare branches to buds to pink froth, and how quickly it changes over a couple of weeks before it’s replaced by green leaves. It’s slightly different every year as the weather is never the same – that unpredictability is fascinating.