Interview: Photographer Kerry Simmons

Kerry Simmons is a London-based photographer and once of the official paps at last year’s London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival.

Now the Westminster-trained snapper has opened her first exhibition in east London’s Oxford House, which  showcases two of Kerry’s bodies of work.

The first, Leisure, is a less of a single collection, and more of a retrospective of much of her work to date.
‘People were asking me what I take pictures of,’ says Kerry. ‘I’ve always found that question really hard to answer, so I looked at what I had and tried to form a link’. The end result is a collection looking at the way we spend our downtime.

‘We get up, we go to work, and then we’ve got this thing called free time,’ Kerry explains, ‘and it is sold back to us in the form of leisure’. Kerry points out that the collection isn’t trying to make a statement about consumerism or a judgement about how people spend their time. It’s more of an observation about the universal pursuit of leisure.

Kerry adds, ‘There are all these things for you to do; how you could spend your money, how you can spend you time’. She identifies that there’s a certain irony in the fact that we spend the majority of our lives at work, earning a crust, for us to then give that money back in our pursuit of recreation.
‘I try and ignore adverts as much as possible,’ says Kerry, ‘but I can’t, it’s impossible’. She points to the universal truth that the more you try to ignore something, the more you see it everywhere.

However leisure isn’t just observations from western, capitalist countries, Kerry’s photographs have been taken across the world, and she’s noticed that there are similarities that cut across cultural differences, namely the amusement park, which is a fixture wherever you go.

The second collection, Welcome to Dreamland, is a focus on her recent trip to Mongolia.

Kerry explains that the journey was an eye-opener for her. She points to the fact that poverty isn’t something which she associates with the cold – subsequently explaining that her concept of poverty was linked to hot countries as a result of the images from Asia and sub-Saharan Africa that she was exposed to when she was younger. However the poverty she found in Mongolia was extreme.

Interestingly though, this isn’t what she chose to focus on in Welcome to Dreamland.
‘I don’t want to be the type of person who goes round taking pictures and going, “look at the poor people” or “look at the rosy-cheeked Mongolians”. Kerry says that her aim with Dreamland was to create a non-biased, observational account of the country, rather than trying to make a statement.

When referring to her articstic style, Kerry says, ‘I don’t set things up. I’ve settled on the urban landscape, so it’s a very difficult thing to set up’.
This is clear when you look at Kerry’s photography, which has a heavy focus on the urban and industrial. People don’t figure too highly in the compositions, they’re definitely more about the ‘what’ than the ‘who’.

‘I take the images when I’m stopped by something, whenever something gives me an emotion’. Kerry describes these emotions as both positive and negative, but she tries – wherever possible – to inject a dose of humour into her work.
This humour is apparent in the title piece, Welcome to Dreamland, which depicts a hoarding, in the middle of the Mongolian nowhere, advertising luxury properties, in English.

Kerry’s next step is to turn the Dreamland collection into book. Artistically, she is in the middle of a frame-making course, and is looking to move away from digital photography and back into analogue.

‘I want to start making complete pieces,’ she says ‘and I’m trying to work out where I fit in this place between documentary and art’.

The exhibitions run until 20th January 2012, at Oxford House, Derbyshire St, E2 6HG. www.oxfordhouse.org.uk
More information about Kerry is available on her website: www.kerrysimmononsphotography.com