How can you go home when a leopard is sleeping in your bed? Most of us go through life caught up in rituals so convincing that we confuse them for the real world, all tenuously tied together by the thin red line we call family. And yet we often ask ourselves, who are these people in my house?
We meet Tony, just as photographer Nik Roche did, living in an arctic bell tent he set up in the woods behind his own house, overlooking a once-thriving mining village in South Wales. As Far As They’re Concerned We Are A Normal Family is about Tony’s search for those tenuous rituals we call home — a home that for Tony has always been elusively just ahead along an ever-deviating pathway, somewhere beyond the trees and rocks, shrouded in a volatile haze of recurrent visions, gut punches, bloodied cuts and cigarette smoke.
Haunted by the ghosts of his past lives — lives that have taken him across England, to Ireland, to a cave in Nepal and now back here to Wales — Tony is surrounded by his own reincarnations, as the animals that accompany his life, though this does mean more mouths to be fed, more mouths to defend, more mouths to bite the hand. Yet still we find, amongst the chaotic residues, and given the chance, there is the momentary joy of a dance and the love of a friend, woven between the dark comedy of life’s short stories.
As for the leopard, for now it sleeps elsewhere and Tony’s bed is empty. The campfire spits with the morning’s sausages. The pigs are fucking in the yard below.
Nik Roche
b. 1970, Neath, South Wales
Nik discovered his passion for photography while pursuing a successful career in garden design, and is a recent graduate from the Documentary Photography MA at University of South Wales. Here, he has developed a highly immersive method for image making, shaped by his interest in social change and the impact of institutions on individual behaviour.
He has a very human approach to his work.
The budgie died instantly, his first monograph has been published by Setanta Books, 2020. Two further chapters are currently in progress; ‘it’s hard to report a stolen bike stolen’ and ‘as far as they’re concerned we are a normal family’.
www.nikroche.com
@nikroche11
