The Weight of Place is a documentary photography project exploring how neighbourhood, circumstance and environment can shape the lives of the people who grow up within them.

The project began in 2015 from my own experience of growing up in an area that was often defined by unemployment, crime and gang culture. I became interested in the distance between the way these communities were represented from the outside and the more complicated reality of living within them. Places described almost entirely through their problems were also places people called home.

Initially, I photographed young men whose lives had become connected to gang culture, including those who did not necessarily see it as a life they had freely chosen. The work considers the circumstances surrounding those experiences: the neighbourhoods they grew up in, the opportunities available to them, the pressures they encountered and the difficulty of moving beyond an identity that others had already assigned to them.

Returning to the project years later has required me to reconsider how it can be continued responsibly. Rather than re-entering circumstances that have changed considerably since the photographs were first made, I am turning my attention towards the landscape itself: the streets, estates and neighbourhoods that shaped these lives. In doing so, the project asks what a place can carry—personal histories, social pressures and assumptions about the people who live there—and how those forces can continue to shape a person long after they leave.