One of my final MA projects was a photo series called ‘Belongings’ – I had three friends come to the studio with a backpack of stuff. If they had to leave everything they knew behind today and had only that bag, I asked them, what would they take with them?

The result was these photos, though I increasingly prefer the individual shots that make them up. Of all the insanely overwrought ideas I had in the run up to the final show (third incredibly fussy installation! postcard holder! branded lighters! USB portfolios!) the one that tempted me the most was to make a little flipbook of the photos. Hence the video. Video is the new flipbook. Well not really, but it’s off my list now, OK?

The other day Stav, a wonderfully big-hearted and relentlessly intense character, saw these photos hanging in the hallway and launched into a critique (Greek accent and expletives omitted): “I want to see their faces! I want to see YOUR face! I want to SEE you in these pictures! And also, I want to see them naked. And I want to see… a baby.”
“Tossed in the air?”
“YES.”

Tossing the baby aside for now, I do remember thinking I should include myself in the shoot – but there were lots of excuses not to, like it was too hard to set aside 10 minutes to think about it, and I couldn’t afford the editing time, and the cost of another print, bla bla bla. Then it occured to me that I already have a belongings document of sorts:

Not a backpack’s worth, but it’s how it felt whittling down fourteen years in Vancouver for three London-bound boxes. It wasn’t as brutal as the first move from Pakistan 14 years before that. Even after a couple of times, it’s difficult to narrow down your belongings to the essentials – especially hypothetically.

All the stuff you choose to face the unknown with makes up the boundary of what you do know or can possibly imagine for the future. For the photoshoot, my friend Shiu packed a multi-head screwdriver and a set of Allen keys. Asli packed facial wax strips and her grandfather’s camera. Ely decided after some deliberation he didn’t need his camera or computer – his stuff is mostly ephemera: notes, letters, journal entries, photos. I moved to Canada with one of my favourite books, an omnibus of Roald Dahl’s short stories. It’s still on the shelf, the books on either side holding it together. And I still carry the impressions those dark, wicked, hilarious stories  imprinted onto my 12-year-old brain. But the book itself… well, it’s just a book. Paper and glue and ink.

That’s what the photos ended up showing me – the line between belonging and object. To me they were just objects, to my friends they were belongings. There’s also a life-cycle where belongings become objects (what happens to your iPhone 3GS when you upgrade to the iPhone 4, for example) and objects become belongings (the book on my father’s shelf that ends up on my shelf 20 years later). My belongings also became objects prior to moving – it was easier to get rid of them that way. I’d be interested to see what my friends would choose this year, or next year, or 10 years from now.

Belongings are objects that orient and ground you – they help you belong where you are, or where you want to be. I suppose they also pin us down to the material maps we share… others can gauge where they feel you belong on that map based on your things. I felt quite free of my web of belongings after a couple of months in London. I blissfully forgot most of the objects I found difficult to part with as I acquired new objects, now belongings, and a new place.