One Photographer’s Melancholic Portrait of His Bedroom Over Time

If you were to distil your life down into a single weekend, how would it look? In Jay Johnson’s new zine, the photographer takes the nearly two-year period he spent living in a former school in Manchester, and transforms his bedroom into a stage set for everything that happened there. The vast building, located in Ancoats, became available as part of a guardianship scheme, where properties like pubs, offices, and police stations are rented out cheaply to tenants in the short term, to keep squatters out as buildings change hands. Citing the atmosphere of heightened creativity, the “mad” parties, the cheap rent, and the central location, Johnson’s time living in the guardianship was to prove extremely fruitful.

“It’s not a normal house,” he explains. “You’d go downstairs, and there’d usually be people playing football on the bottom floor, riding bikes around, skateboarding, or just doing something stupid down there. There was never really a dull moment – something was always going on.” After posting a photo from his new series online, Johnson received a message from someone who recognised his former English classroom, except now, it was Johnson’s bedroom. This is where his new, 36-page zine, Classroom, gets its name from.

Although they come with many upsides – massive square footage, cheap rent, no neighbours, etc – guardianships are also highly precarious, with tenants receiving a 28-day notice period before they have to move out. After getting his move-out date, on his final weekend in the house, Johnson set up a camera on a tripod in the corner of his bedroom, which now contained just a mattress on the floor, a lamp, and a fan – a barren stage set for his memories of the house. In the zine’s images, the passage of time is clear, although they are not laid out chronologically – Johnson wanted the images to “flutter between these different states and different times of day”. Some of the photos are joyful and raucous, others melancholy and contemplative; friends hang from the beams on the ceiling, ride bikes, light up cigarettes, eat takeout on the floor, while in others, Johnson is alone in his bedroom, brushing his teeth or talking on the phone in various states of undress, his blue jeans crumpled up on the floor next to his shoes. His bed is then empty, before it disappears from the room altogether. “It’s weird, because it did feel like home,” he says of the house, “but at the same time, it just didn’t at all.”

Below, in his own words, Jay Johnson tells us about the strange atmosphere of the house, and the making of Classroom.

“It was the start of start of 2022 when I moved into the house. I’d already been round there quite a few times because it’s in Ancoats, which is bang in the city centre of Manchester. It was just a really cool place for people to meet up before they were going out in town. When I moved in, I started off in a room in the basement because that was the way it worked – you start in the basement and then work your way up. So I was living in the basement for six months, which was not very fun at all. It had hard, tiled floors, and really clinical white lights … there wasn’t much natural light.

“While I was in there, I was like, ‘Do I really want to be here?’ But what kept me there was the fact that everyone in the building was creatively inclined in one way or another. My friend Rory, who’s a director, lived there, and my friend Chris, who’s a stylist, had this whole floor, a huge showroom just full of clothes. So there was always really interesting stuff going on in the house. It was such a cool place to live, from a creative standpoint. There were always pretty mad parties going on.

“I moved upstairs after about six months and was much happier with the space I had. The whole time I was there, I knew I needed to take pictures because it was such a crazy situation. I wanted to remember it and preserve it because everyone knew that they [the owners of the building] could literally turn around at any minute and just be like, you’ve got to go. When we got the move-out date, I knew it was time to do something. So I came up with this idea where my camera would be completely locked off on a tripod in the corner of my room. It was when I’d already started moving all of my belongings out of the room, so I was left with just a mattress in this bare room. I thought it looked interesting, a bit like a film set.

“I wanted the pictures to be reflective of the time that I’d spent in the house. I’d motivate certain scenarios, so I’d let people in the house know about the project, and then I’d invite them into the room and allow them to interpret it in their own way. There’s a picture where my friends are hanging off one of the beams on the ceiling – that’s the kind of stupid stuff we used to do in that house. I wanted some of the pictures to nod to the bigger picture of what people were getting up to in the house, not necessarily just in my bedroom. It’s not a normal house. You’d go downstairs, and there’d usually be people playing football on the bottom floor, riding bikes around, skateboarding, or just doing something stupid down there. There was never really a dull moment – something was always going on.

“It was new to me to put myself in the picture. It’s not something I’ve ever done before, but I felt like it’d be strange not to. They’re some of my favourite pictures, just because I spent a lot of time on my own in there. It’s weird, because it did feel like home, but at the same time, it just didn’t at all. Especially being in that basement, that was the worst time. I went through a lot of emotions living there, which is why I wanted to document it and show how I was feeling at that time.

“Looking back at that time now, it doesn’t feel real. It feels like a weird dream. I knew it would feel like that when we left because it was such a unique setup. It was super cheap, the amount of space you got was just unbelievable, and you’re literally facing some of the most expensive flats in the city. It felt like we’d cheated the game a little bit.”

Classroom by Jay Johnson is self-published, and is out now.