A bit of the past stuck in the present

It's the small, everyday details that form the identity of a country - as well as a remembrance of the past, Ian Howorth tells Damien Demolder

- Damien Demolder

I think we all know that finding exciting things to shoot when we are close to home is much more difficult than when we are away in a new place. At home we become a little blind to the stuff we see every day and we quickly find that there's either nothing new or nothing of any interest to take pictures of. When we are away however, everything is new and exciting, and the world seems full of opportunity.

It's annoying though when someone from outside wanders onto our home patch and discovers there's loads to shoot - things we fail to see because we are simply too close to them, too used to them. Ian Howorth is one of those people.

Born in Peru, brought up in Miami and a resident of the UK since his late teens, Ian still has the eye of an outsider even though he's lived in England for 25 years. That outsider's perspective allows him to see us and the country in a way that perhaps we can't see ourselves. Ian says his new book, A Country Kind Of Silence, is a study of the identity of England from his outsider's perspective.

Visual identity

'When you've been taken out of the three countries you've lived in at key moments of your development you can get a bit of an identity issue, feel a bit alien and struggle with the concept of home,' says lan. 'I'm not really sure where I'm from, and my first book, Arcadia, was about me asking myself some questions through my photography.