Tex Bishop: Greenford

Tex Bishop: Greenford by Aline SmithsonJanuary 15, 2018

©Tex Bishop

London photographer, Tex Bishop, has created a body of work, Greenford, that speaks to memory, family, and documenting personal histories. After discovering a family photo album, he set out to create a different kind of collection of images, using the album as a jumping off point and way to document the stable parts of his life: his grand parents, after the deterioration of his own immediate family. This work is about yearning, about time passing, seasons changing, and small moments, but ultimately it’s about the melancholy of loss.

Tex Bishop is a photographer from London. After leaving school early with hopes of becoming a dancer, he had a two year stint working in factual television before he got a job working in a black and white darkroom. Learning from a master printer, he began to take and print his own pictures, later working in a colour darkroom. Tex spent a year and a half assisting the photographer Jamie Hawkesworth before going on to work independently. Since then he has been working on commissions and long term projects.

©Tex Bischop

My grandparents have lived in the Greenford suburb of London for 60 odd years, and when I was kicked out of the family home, I ended up living in their house for a year and a half. I had started taking pictures of my family after finding a photo album my parents had made of me from my birth until my sister came along. I imagined other enthusiastic parents in love who had made these tender and loving albums documenting the joy of new parenthood. Fast forward twenty or so years (and six children later) and my parents are very much separated. It seems funny to think that these same two people felt something so different once upon a time.

These pictures are the response to a tumultuous time where I sought constant, stable things, which were seeing my grandparents every evening, and the darkroom. I felt very much a visitor in their house, despite having known it all my life. As I observed their habits and idiosyncratic ways, I felt I was observing a bittersweet phenomenon of decay. Being aware of how temporary this situation was and how temporary my grand parents might be, I set out to make a family album of sorts that I would remember this time by.