Chris Shaw

"Sandy Hill Estate lies to the North West of Farnham, on the border of Surrey and Hampshire. A mixture of private and council housing, the estate was designed around a through road, which ran like a spine, with cul-de-sacs leading off it to parking areas made up of open areas and garages.

Chris Shaw began taking photographs on the Sandy Hill housing estate near Aldershot in 1987 just after, as he puts it: “I got in a bit of trouble at college for my attitude and they tried to chuck me out.” When pressed on what kind of trouble exactly, he says matter-of-factly: “I was causing mayhem on the campus, turning up to classes pissed.”

His exhaustion inevitably led to mistakes in the darkroom, which he came to embrace. “Once, I dropped a print on the floor and stood on it. There’s thumb smudges on some of the prints from when I touched them when the emulsion was still wet.

One wonders what will happen as Shaw continues to be embraced by the art world (the Tate hosted a mini-retrospective last year). For now, he remains an elusive figure, content to work quietly away on his own terms and one senses he doesn’t suffer fools gladly. “The fact that I’ve managed to do five different books with five different publishers without destroying the working relationships is a bit of a miracle in itself,” he says at one point.

I like these images as they capture life of a young adult with the monochromatic photos which capture the emotions and mood in the pictures.