At the start of In Common three years ago, my motivation was to renew an instinctive, playful way of looking while connecting to my environment; trying to photograph before thoughts form.
Mitcham Common in South London is a very mysterious place. It is wild and beautiful, carelessly abandoned, with very few people: a real colliding space of urban decay and natural growth. It is also where I go for walks with my dog Stella.
Over the past few years my connection with the Common changed. It became more personal and more intimate, especially during the Covid-19 lockdowns. While my life became more domesticated, this space became my refuge, a wilderness I could immerse myself and find peace and joy.
Observing my need for this natural connection, the idea of “Dasein” became of keen interest. A term used by the philosopher Martin Heidegger to describe us humans as being within the world, closely connected to it. We are embedded in our environment and not separate from it. But how can we communicate this very simple fact?
Looking through my photographs of the Common, I was surprised by the tenderness that these images seem to share. I feel I have created a love letter to this open space – pictures that mirror my acceptance of a place in the outside world.
Maybe this trigger of joy allowed me to bypass my conscious brain after all, revealing something of that delicate and wordless connection. That, at least, is my hope.
I want this series to feel immersive, like an embrace. To fall into a beautiful chaos. To show the already present, natural structures that surround us and are there whenever we look for them.
I believe that we all have in common the ability to reconnect with our existing environment, to feel rooted within it and to forge a relationship that can resonate within us and with the wider world.
A selection of the images from the series are shown below (click to view image at full size / original format).
ABOUT CLAUDIA LEISINGER
Claudia Leisinger is an award-winning freelance photographer with focus on portraiture, documentary photography stories and audio-visual pieces based in London.
Since her MA in Photojournalism & Documentary photography in 2007, she has been working for numerous periodicals (Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg Businessweek, Foreign Policy magazine, Buzz Feed, The Big Issue) charities, institutes and think tanks (Red Cross, Lead International, BMW Foundation, Earth Security, Chatham House, The Hague Institute for Global Justice), commercial clients (Airbnb, R/GA, Keds, Christies, Hunter) and various artists and galleries.
Throughout her photography practice she continually works on self-initiated long-term audio-visual projects. Stories like “The Last of the Billingsgate Fish Porters” a yearlong documentation on how 150 men lost their precious jobs when the City of London Corporation enforced the removal of a centuries-old tradition. The underlying story is an all-too common occurrence, the loss of working-class manual labour and its immediate effects on the attached communities but also on our society as a whole.
The resulting audio-visual piece on the Billingsgate Porters was selected for Night Contact, London’s first ever Multimedia Festival, published in the Guardian UK, and was exhibited in a solo exhibition.
Her portraits have also been selected and exhibited nation-wide as part of Portrait of Britain and Portrait of Humanity awards, to name just a few recent ones.
She is a founding member of Collective Eye, a grassroots podcast who amplifies the diverse voices within the photography industry that aren’t given enough opportunity to share their knowledge.
“In Common” her latest work, created over the last three years has just been published by Another Place Press within its “field notes” series in March 2022 – more details at this link here
Website: claudialeisinger.com
Instagram: @claudialeisinger
CREDITS
Unless otherwise stated, all words and images in this article are © Claudia Leisinger
