“It’s almost like I created an Americanised view of an English town,” says Callum Hansen of his first solo show, which captures his friends in the English midlands during the pandemic
The transitional stage of adolescence is a formative one – a precarious moment existing somewhere between childhood and adulthood, innocence and experience. A melancholic time of dreaming, play, hope and anxiety, it hovers at the threshold of maturity and anticipates a sad separation from those we grew up with. Leaning into the uncertainty of his future, at the age of 17, the photographer Callum Hansen embarked on a creative journey in his hometown in a remote part of the Midlands. Taken during the Covid years, Hansen’s work amplifies the isolation that befell his age group, who escaped the dull reality of their rural surroundings through recreational pleasure and wild abandon.
A few years later, the photographer – now 22 and currently studying at Central Saint Martins – has exhibited the resulting body of chromogenic prints in his first solo show, Victoria, at Lewisham Arthouse. Paying homage to those whimsical yet uncertain years set against an idyllic, bucolic landscape, his photos speak to the nostalgia of late youth.
“When you grow up in a small town, you’re faced with an inevitable crossroads. Either your friends stay, or they can’t wait to leave” Hansen says to AnOther. The end of school is invariably an emotionally loaded turning point in a young person’s life – when the familiar, insular world they once inhabited is often eclipsed by an adventure to foreign places.
Originally born in Seattle, Hansen didn’t move to the UK until he was about five years old. “Until the age of about 17, I was incredibly quiet. I didn’t find my feet or my people until those final years,” he says. A quiet observer preferring to dwell on the sidelines, he escaped the boredom and alienation of his early teen years by animatedly researching the history of photography, finding inspiration from American photographers who romanticise youth and skateboarding culture, as well as life in the suburbs: Ed Templeton, Ryan McGinley and Larry Clark.
Photography became a form of refuge and escapism. “When you feel isolated from the rest of the world, you become a sponge for this kind of media,” Hansen says. “For me and my circle of friends, we were very informed by the photography coming out of America. In the context of our town, we were a group of outcasts – the creative misfits who saw things differently and longed for something else.” Thus, the idealising of American youth culture served as a springboard into photography for Hansen – a nod to his artistic heroes but also a yearning for his roots. “It’s almost like I created an Americanised view of an English town.”
The group of friends – largely comprised of boys who enjoy skateboarding and rebelling against the conformity of their small town – imagined alternative, far-reaching possibilities. But it wasn’t all fun and games. “Boyhood and the pressures that come with that were definitely felt in our town,” Hansen adds. “And I think that extends to life in general – that pressure to grow up really fast and to have formative experiences. To prove that you’re hard, or a ‘man’.” It wasn’t uncommon for young boys to join gangs, deal drugs or even end up in prison. “I saw people from my town become trapped into a particular way of thinking. They gave into that underlying sense of competition and the need to prove themselves.”
While his photographs capture freedom and innocent play, they also hint towards the darker realities of teenhood; when boys, at the cusp of adulthood, succumb to nefarious influences in the hope to be accepted, find identity or feel part of something bigger.
In the case of Hansen, a compulsive desire to quietly capture the poetry in the everyday proved to be an antidote. Through his camera, he was prematurely mourning the loss of those halcyon times of play and connection. “It was one of the most exciting times of my life. Life had come to a sort of standstill and we were able to let go and just be uninhibited,” he says. “Photography is how I’ve learned to communicate with others but also to learn about myself. For me, it has its own kind of language and that’s what motivates me.”
Victoria by Callum Hansen ran at Lewisham Arthouse in London from 1-10 July 2023.