A chent'annos is the typical Sassari toast wishing long life, spoken at celebrations as a promise of time, health and shared joy. Packed into just a few words are memory, stubbornness, and the desire to keep going, even when a city seems to be slowing down.

Sassari is the second largest city in Sardinia, sitting on a plateau in the northwest, one of the island's oldest urban centres with a historic core carrying centuries of culture, language and community life. Today it has just over 120,000 inhabitants and keeps losing population year after year. It's a demographic winter, fewer births, more elderly, quiet departures. You see it in the historic centre, empty houses, shuttered shops, absences that pile up over time.

Over the last decades people moved to the new neighbourhoods, more comfortable with parking, lifts, services. The city is ageing, not enough jobs, young people looking elsewhere, other cities or countries. So the historic centre has gaps, but also new presences, families and people from other places who keep the daily fabric alive despite the fragility.

I was invited to create and develop a photographic project about the city centre. Over a week, I talked and shot people as I met them roaming the streets, using shutters, balconies, thresholds as the background while I walked, listened, paused. In this tangle of stone and crumbling plaster, closed doors and lit windows, this series is born. Not a map, not a census, just fragments of life. Each portrait is a small dam against the emptying, a simple way to bring people back into public space through the gaze.

The final idea was to use the lowered shutters and empty shops as a natural display for the photos. And thanks to Endas Form and Biokip, a public exhibition was born. My 30 images turn the urban space into a widespread exhibition on 25 streets, returning faces and stories of the community and bringing people back to the streets.
These faces don't celebrate a lost past, they exist in Sassari's present, in a city asking who leaves, who arrives, who stays. Portraits looking at whoever passes by, asking what future we imagine for these streets.

A chent'annos here becomes a wish for both people and place. May these streets continue to be lived in, inhabited, contradictory and imperfect, but still capable of generating encounters, voices, games, arguments and silences. May the historic centre be not just a backdrop, but a living body, where each face adds a piece of story to the long history of Sassari.

60 Miles by Road or Rail is an intergenerational arts project exploring and celebrating Northampton New Town heritage. It is supported by the Arts Council England and the National Lottery Heritage Fund.
This socially engaged project aimed to document Northampton new town stories after 50 years of its creation. The photography is part of a much wider project and collaboration between me as a photographer, a videographer and includes oral history and theatre.
Over the course of a few months, I have developed a photographic project which ended up featuring more than 200 portraits and captured 190 residents with their own voices and stories.
The portraits were all taken in the Eastern part of Northampton, often referred to as the ‘Eastern District’, which was the first part of the extension and creation of a New Town. The Eastern District often has a bad reputation but for many it’s simply Home.

The project was shown at the Northampton Museum in December 2021 with a solo photographic exhibition. For more info:
https://www.60milesbyroadorrail.co.uk/
“The exhibition features a fantastic series of unrehearsed portrait images of residents outside their homes, shops and community centres, accompanied by stories from the subjects reflecting on the place they call home.
Presented in a state-of-the-art digital format at Northampton Museum, audiences are invited to take a contemporary look at the town’s New Town legacy and what it means for residents today.”

Evering Road is a mile long road in the heart of Hackney. I've lived here for more than eight years, without ever truly knowing those around me.
Lockdown presented a unique opportunity. I couldn’t do my usual work, but I could turn my camera on to my own community. With people having more time on their hands, I started documenting my neighbours from a safe distance.

At first, the project was mostly for my personal sanity, but in talking to the people of Evering Road, I began to uncover a consoling web of human stories, small gestures and common threads. One of the few positives of this pandemic has been how communities have pulled together. I saw evidence of this every time I stepped out of my front door.
So I opened an account on Instagram called @everingroad and posted daily. The idea was to tell at least one story per day during the first phase of lockdown, which began on the 24th March 2020 and ended on the 31st of May.

The account quickly became popular, featured in Guardian Weekend and on the Instagram account of Vanity Fair Italia, and the BBC. This was great but I’m particularly proud of the way in which it became a community hub; a way for neighbours to connect and get to know each other.

Evering Road is unique. Built at the end of the 19th century, this long, leafy road is strikingly diverse, a microcosm of London life in 2020. Its levels of social housing and ethnic diversity are significantly higher than the national average. Many properties are owned by housing associations and estates are interspersed amongst the Victorian villas.
Just twenty years ago, the area was considered rough. Although gentrification has inevitably crept in, the road holds traces of how east London used to be. It’s a wonderful melting pot, where a strong sense of community sits alongside liberal values. Here people can be whomever they choose.
There is also a real mixture of ages, from young families to students just starting out, to retirees who have lived entire lives here, frequently after having arrived from faraway countries and impoverished backgrounds. In documenting the road’s residents, I’ve had the privilege of listening to a wide variety of stories across the generations - from the struggle of millennials to the anxiety of people in their 80s.

Despite the huge range of voices, what emerged most from the many people I spoke to was our collective humanity. Whatever our age or background, we share so many of the same joys and fears.
That’s why I decided to go one step further and create a photo book. A unique diary of these unprecedented times. A memento of how we pulled together, to take forwards with us into the future. I put the project on Kickstarter, swiftly raising enough to make it a reality, with many generous donations from the very community I’ve documented.
So here we are. A road, like hundreds of others but also distinctive. Its residents united through their smiles to each other, the views shared from windows, the small gestures of cooperation. Lives lived side by side and - perhaps more than ever - together.

I spent the first 2 weeks of the football World Cup traveling around England watching 13 games with as many different nationalities as possible, capturing the joy and despair in British living rooms.
One of the nicest and most joyful (intense at the time) jobs ever done.
I’ve eaten a lot of crisps and beer, but also the traditional Brazilian dish of feijoada in north London, Mexican quesadillas and guacamole in Putney, Colombian arepas in Manchester, and a lovely Moroccan tagine cooked on the barbecue in Letchworth.
I sat with a fixed camera near the television screen and never asked anyone to pose. As soon as the match got underway, they forgot I was there.
Very few people left the room or changed positions throughout the game. They were glued to their chairs

I’ve lived in Hackney since 2003 when I moved to the UK and have witnessed its changes socially and structurally year by year. The gentrification of the city is especially visible in this part of town. The City is moving east, transforming its social and architectural fabric.

Hackney is divided into different sections, each sub-section so deeply disparate from the other. From Stamford Hill, with its Jewish community to Hackney Wick, where artists have transformed once empty warehouses into their studios. From Hackney Central, which lends itself to a great energy through its multiculturalism and diversity to the ‘cool and trendy’ Shoreditch. From the council estates of Hackney South and Homerton, to the new-builds for families in Stoke Newington and Lower Clapton.

London – like all major cities – never stands still, but the speed at which Hackney is transforming has been enhanced, thanks to the Olympics and new investment generated from the event. As a consequence, many people are destined to leave this part of town to move further east, but many other homeowners have seen their properties increase in value.

My project intends to photograph each sub-section to deconstruct Hackney and offer a voice to its residents. The borough, its architecture and atmosphere can be seen in the background, but the attention is focused on the people of Hackney, each photographed where I found them as a I rambled through this part of the world.

The idea for this project came about when I was commissioned by Guardian News and Media to take portraits of older people in the King’s Cross area – Age Uk Camden is one of GNM’s local community partners. I was inspired by the hope and optimism of the people I met. My photographs are designed to challenge perceptions about the elderly, and show that older people can be glamorous, inspired, beautiful, and full of life.

In order to capture this optimism, I had the idea to photograph all of the subjects in studio conditions as if it were a fashion shoot. I asked all of the sitters to dress in their favourite clothes, I hired a make-up artist, and for the photograph I asked them to think about a really happy time or experience. The portraits are meant to be a playful take on the circularity of life.

I tried to create conditions that allowed my subjects to recapture, however fleetingly, the spontaneity and curiosity of a child. The background colours - the rose and pale blue - are intentional, an ironic reference to the fashion and advertising worlds. In other words, I tried to capture them in ideal conditions as they themselves would like to be seen. The 16 people I photographed were enthusiastic about the challenge, in the excitement is evident from the light in their eyes.