HOME and AWAY

HOME and AWAY is a two-volume unofficial retrospective book from Alasdair McLellan features work spanning his 35 year career, a foreword by Bob Stanley and essay by Jo-Ann Furniss. 

Volume II —Seventh Heaven

What are these books? The greatest hits? Not really. A double album? Sort of. A retrospective? Certainly, but not a definitive one. These books were nearly entitled The New Elizabethans as the last picture was taken just after Queen Elizabeth’s death in 2022 while all of the people in the pictures or the locations that appear are British. Yet that title seemed a little too narrowand far too royal. So, it’s HOME and AWAY.

HOME and AWAY is an idea of where somebody is from, where they travel to, and where, if they are the photographer Alasdair McLellan, they find themselves now after taking pictures for 35 years. These books fall somewhere between those two worlds, as does Alasdair McLellan himself.

Alasdair started his life as a photographer aged thirteen, in 1987. His pictures today have changed little; his way of looking at the world is almost exactly the same. The first picture he ever took looks like it could have been captured yesterday. Today, the people might have grown up, but they are essentially the same kind of people in Alasdair’s pictures, no matter how famous they are, their age or status. Something of the subject’s thirteen-year-old self still shines through; there is something untouched and open about themand there is always springtime light…

“I find myself thinking about the photos I took as a teenager in Doncaster  the various influences that inspired me to be a photographer in the first place. I suppose it’s a return to simpler times; it was just me and the subject rather than having 30 people standing behind me waiting for the picture to be taken, as it often is now. But at the heart of the pictures then and now, it’s still that same relationship—it’s only who or what you photograph that really matters.”

Alasdair McLellan