A4 Pigment Prints on Cartridge Paper

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'Windmills of East Sussex' was a large body of documentary work that allowed me to photograph many windmills around the East Sussex area. The project was an explorative journey, where I drove my little old car around these magnificent structures. Days after days were simply spent photographing windmills.

Being born in the West Midlands, these architectural forms were quite uncommon to me. When I moved to Brighton to begin my photography degree in 2017 I was fascinated by these humbling buildings. Each new journey travelling to find another mill became an exciting expedition. This work saw me visit 12 of the windmills in the East Sussex area. Originally looking at architecture, attempting a typographic approach, I ended up eventually more drawn to the nature-material divide of these structures. Observing that these forms were surrounded by the resources that had usually built them - trees. The wooden windmills were a perfect celebration of what man could achieve with this amazing material, a lifecycle of a resource contained in one 35mm frame. 

Something that amused me on arriving at the structures was how normative they had become in residential life. The forms I found to be so beautiful and humbling, were sat in the centre of a cul-de-sac surrounded by houses, or, were just the next property along in a row on a street. Visible just from your kitchen window, emerging from the trees or the garden bushes, was a windmill. 

The images I captured exhibit classic analogue features: edge rebate, grain and water marks. My images were kept organic, just as my experiences of the mills had been.