Matthew Finn explores personal relationships both within the corpus of the family as well as the wider stage of personal relationships through photographic projects. With no commercial constraints or deadlines, Finn cultivates a working practice of an auteur, in charge of all the elements of the work where the craft of the print and the process as a whole are equally important. Finn makes bodies of work including his series of portraits of students, commencing in the early 1990s, and durational bodies of work that focus on the province of family life and close relationships.

Finn’s most notable works include the thirty-one-year process of making intimate, domestic portraits of his mother and the twenty-eight years he documented his relationship with his uncle. Today Finn collaborates with family members as he pursues the universal themes of love, loss, bereavement and intimacy. Through these current and completed projects Matthew Finn has expanded the frontiers of documentary photography, bringing a new and deeply psychological reality to the genre.

What I like about his work: I really like that his work is all monochromatic, even throughout his ‘School of Art’ project, which doesn’t focus on Finn’s family, he still considers using this style of photography. This means that there is a nostalgic tone and imaginary to his work, and I would to recreate this kind of feeling throughout my work. I think that the composition of his photography means that

‘Mother’ Project

Finn states “My father is not present in these photographs just as he wasn’t in our lives and yet he haunts these images. He was also the main reason that this project became so important to both me and my mother. He died twenty six years ago. On the evening before the funeral, my mother, cigarette in hand, told me of half-brothers sisters that I would meet the following day at the funeral. This was a complete shock to me. It seemed that my father was well known around Leeds and had been married several times (at the same time).”

Image Analysis: I really like this photograph above, this is mostly because the concept behind the imaginary is clear within this style of photography, this means that the bright lighting and the fact that her face is in the middle of the image. The love that he shares for his mum is something that is very obvious throughout this image, and I would like to replicate this in my own project. Furthermore, the fact that his mother is touching her face may be a link to the lack of love she has experienced from Finn’s father, who was distance and was married to multiple different women at once. Her individual strength of character and the fact that she has been able to deal with this kind of family issues if definitely shown throughout this project.

“School of Art is everything I’d hoped it would be. This is a subject I love and Stanley / Barker always does a fantastic job. But it’s MOTHER that was the punch in the gut. Your introduction is one of the finest I’ve ever read. It’s perfect, and supercharges the photographs.”- Alec Soth

This are some of my favourite images from the whole of Finn’s whole ‘Mother’ project, I think that the contrast within these images is very strong and is most present, with the bright lights highlighting his mothers figure along with the darker backgrounds means that her significance is implied. Is it clear to the viewer throughout these four photographs alone that his mother was someone that he looked up to, and her bright figure supports this concept. This style of photography is one that is very hard to replicate, this is because of the quality and the quantity of the images.

Finn also states: “It turned out that I was the youngest child and that I was the only one who didn’t know anything about these entangled lives. Now I was able to begin to piece things together: to understand why I would see my father’s car all over Leeds during the summer holidays, outside a terraced house with an unfinished painted fence, outside a semi with an overgrown garden. These were the places he called home.”

“Matthew Finn’s work draws us into the always fascinating dynamic between mother and son. That he is the only son of a single mother intensifies this connection. Matthew and his mother, Jean, are a family of two, and their lives are deeply intertwined. They are dependent on each other, and Matthew is, in many senses, the ‘man’ in Jean’s life. Through the lens, Matthew seems to find perspective on this intensified version of what is the most natural, elemental bond – that of a mother and child.”- Elinor Carucci

What aspects of his work will be present in my project? I would like to show my admiration for some of my closest family members through my future project, just like Finn has done with his Mother and also his Uncle. I’m not sure what kind of photography style I will adapt to do this, but I would like to take image of my mum, dad and brother and make sure that they are a significant part of this project. Furthermore, I would like to make a lot of my images monochromatic as this means that their is a nostalgic feeling towards my work.