” People don’t want to be felt sorry for; they just want to be heard.”
Marie Mccormack, GlasgowAsk people if they could have any superpower then what would they choose and pretty high up the list would come invisibility. To move unseen, unheard, no one aware of your existence. The freedom to observe whilst being unobserved yourself. Leaving no trace and no witness. Of course, this is with the assumption that you are in control of your own visibility or otherwise. That you still have agency. To have invisibility imposed upon you with no guarantee that you will ever be seen again is another thing entirely. Invisibility is not disappearance. As I write this, there is a video online that has, at last count, had 14.5 million views of a guy doing a magic trick using his unwitting younger brother. He covers the boy in a sheet, then in a room full of expectant friends and family members, he removes the sheet with a flourish and, lo and behold, the boy has disappeared. The rest of the family are in uproar, shocked and amazed by the trick, calling out for the lost boy. The boy, however, is still there, looking on, bemused, as his family goes crazy in front of him. He is, of course, not invisible at all. It’s all a prank, pre-planned, to trick him into thinking he can no longer be seen. A state of being that mere minutes before he might have dreamed of, fantasised about – but now he is tasting something of its reality. His bemusement quickly turns to distress, and soon he is sobbing, terrified, desperately pleading with his family to see him, to make them aware that he still exists. To once again be revealed as having presence.
This is a book of revelation, also. The faces in these photographs look out at us on an equal footing. Asking to be seen and heard. Not as case studies or statistics. People. Lives being lived. Each telling us a small but significant part of their story. Not as background colour to grit up a screen drama, or as council estate fodder for a tabloid scrounger story.