A while ago I shared a short project I’d done, photographing the cups and mugs I use for my quite particular tea and coffee drinking habits. This photograph is a follow up to that but also probably an insight into why I photograph ‘the everyday’ quite so much: these things mean something to me but they don’t last forever.
A few months ago we watched ‘The Dig’ on Netflix, it’s a good Sunday afternoon movie about about the excavation of Sutton Hoo. In it one of the characters said something about ‘photography as a way of fixing moments in time’. I know it’s been said many times before by many different people, but I scribbled it down in my notebook because on that afternoon it reminded me that’s what I think I’m trying to do a lot of the time. I guess we all are – hold on to moments, document places I won’t physically go to again, see something I can’t hold in my hand again because it smashed when I slipped on the stairs. It seems like a ridiculously grand thing to say about a picture of a cup but I’m talking more broadly about photographs that document places, events or things when I say it – it’s the closest things I have to time travel, really.
As with the previous images in the series, I shot this with my Mamiya RB67 (once I’d solved the light leak problem). The other images show the cups in the places I usually drink from them, this sets the scene of how it met its demise. At least the saucer survived.
