2022: a year in photos

Every year I spend December gently synthesising my favourite pictures and cultural snippets and general reflections on the year month by month. 2022 has taken longer to remember - I’ve taken fewer film photos (though more author portraits) and recorded less as the year flew and meandered by. But almost everything I ever put on the internet is primarily to remember later down the line, so here we go.

january

A slow slide into 2022. Fireworks on the beach and a deja vu plod through political misery after another Christmas thwarted by COVID. A week of tapping out essays on algorhythmic violence and colonial informatic systems, turning 29 by the sea and cooking delicious and sometimes strange things. Warming up to the year with a really freezing weekend in Kent, dinners with friends, a raucous family funeral and drinking and dancing across London. A lingering feeling of precarity due to infectious disease and incompetent governance (much the same come December).

top film: The Truffle Hunters, a doc about old Italian men and their beautiful dogs
top book: Freedom is a Constant Struggle by Angela Y. Davis, a Christmas present from my in-laws
top podcast: Human Resources from Broccoli Productions, on the omnipresent histories of slavery in modern Britain
top art: Helen Levitt’s New York street photography at The Photographers Gallery

february

Rain in London and sun in Portugal. Football, karaoke, an aubergine pasta cake a la Stanley Tucci. Sodden days in Bath and Bristol visiting old relatives and old friends; a long weekend in Porto that fluctuated between the magical (sunsets over the city, cycling by the sea, sizzling seafood in alleyway restaurants) and the miserable (dragging ourselves around a labarynthine gallery with as-yet-unidentified COVID). COVID for the third time since 2020 but the only time this year, a 2022 blessing.

top film: The Myrtha Mermaid, a BBC doc about a Welsh housewife training to swim in the Arctic
top TV: Anne+, inspiring a deep envy of the 20 nothing gays of Amsterdam
top theatre: finally seeing An unfinished man at The Yard, a show I worked on what feels like a lifetime ago
top podcast: The Irish Passport, invaluable all-round insights for a second generation trying to justify our own Irish passports
top art: Paula Rego at the Arnolfini in Bristol, generating a conversation on her abortion images with a stranger

march

A lot of time spent in quarantine in London and recuperation in Brighton; armfuls of books and podcasts on 1.5x speed (this is how I listen to your voicenotes too). Work, cats, cold water swimming and stiff cups of tea at the greasy spoon in Bloomsbury after class. Rounded out by a ten year university anniversary weekend in blossom-filled Oxford, which never seems to change no matter how much I do.

top film: After Love, about grief and deception and including incredible shots of the Dover cliffs and Joanna Scanlan’s face
top book: Our Wives Under the Sea, spooky lesbian submarine drama from Julia Armfield who also featured on last year’s highlights and wrote one of my favourite articles of the year
top TV: Love is Blind Japan, the original and the only truly revelatory of all the Love is Blinds
top podcast: Knifepoint Horror, the best and creepiest horror fiction podcast I found this year

april

A month of essays and fieldwork for my first ethnography involving freezing dips, hours of transcription and countless pints and coffees spent speaking to people about something they absolutely love. Sometimes making art about it. The first of a wedding-heavy summer, and a weekend in grey yet eternally gorgeous Glasgow with some of my favourites seeing art and drinking cocktails and retreating from a weather system I’m not sure I could personally endure for more than a long weekend.

top film: The Steam of Life, a Finnish documentary about sauna culture for which we could find no subtitles but enjoyed nonetheless
top book: Follow Me Akhi, exploring online culture of British muslims by a favourite commentator Hussein Kesvani
top art: Eric Watts’ photos of Glasgow streetscapes at the Kelvingrove Gallery
top TV: the first season of The White Lotus, the best telly of the year until season 2
top podcast: Your Undivided Attention from the Center of Humane Technology, a podcast which I cited in essays at least twice

may

A big exam snuck under the wire of my first time as a bridesmaid - comparable experiences as deeply stressful yet ultimately rewarding. Saying goodbye to a year of the best location London will ever offer me - god bless my friend Traff and his dad’s car for 2 years of tireless efforts moving me across this city. My bicycle, author portraits, the inbetween-ness of the end of our 20s encapsulated by a night in a YMCA dormitory following another wedding. And then the final perfect day in Brighton, the last in a year of perfect days in Brighton.

top art: Mohamed Hafez’s miniature Syrian homescapes as part of the Brighton Festival
top theatre: Magic Mike Live for a hen party I organised, which was the best piece of live performance I saw this year
top TV: The Staircase, the most interesting re-telling of this horrible case I’ve seen (and I’ve seen them all)
top podcast: The Teacher’s Trial, one of very few pieces of true crime journalism that has actually brought material justice for a victim

Midnight sun on the lake of our Finnish cabin. Almost impossible to choose one photo from this month, which encompassed five countries and five rolls of film.

june

The best month in the year - kicked off by my first published in-jacket author portrait, spotted in a favourite Amsterdam bookshop. Three weeks of travel through the canals and dykes and bitterballen and horrible summer weather of the Netherlands by bike, Estonian domes and speakeasies and golden hour, a Finnish cabin idyll and the saunas and smoked fish of Helsinki. Weeks of sunsets and aperatifs and daily watercolours and all my favourite photos of the year in a fortnight. I’ve seen more new cities this year than in many years. I’m incredibly grateful for the life, the job, and, in particular, the person who makes it all possible.

top book: Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book, a dreamy tale of summers in Finland by a lake, read during a summer in Finland by a lake
top art: Maus Lamrabat at Amsterdam’s Foam Gallery
top TV: First Kill, a lesbian vampire show need I say more
top podcast: Subtitle and Rough Translation, brillant podcasts for travelling covering language, culture and shared understandings of the world

England win the Euros on what I realised too late was black and white film.

july

My best friend got married and it was almost as glorious as her hen party of fire pits, wild swimming and sheep herding. A perfect London summer month watching England win the Euros, eating and chatting outside, ranking new swimming spots and hiding from the heat in cool stone architecture. This first season of weddings has made summers of carefree socialising feel bittersweet from the tailend of the year, even as I savour them. They are balanced on the hinge of the next phase of life, memories of lockdowns still visceral, loomed over by the long shadow of the London rental market. But also, we moved! We love our flat very much, it’s my favourite iteration of home.

top book: Briefly A Delicious Life by Nell Stevens
top art: In The Air at the Wellcome Collection
top TV: Borgen, which I have now watched all the way until the final episode which I cannot bear to finish
top podcast: the Tortoise slow newcast, reporting I trust where I always learn something new

august

I squeezed in a visit to a favourite French place with my extended family. Like my ancient university town so little seems to change here that coming back feels like an check-in on how much I have. We spent a weekend cycling around the islands of Essex and sleeping in a Tudor tower, although we missed the Henry VIII anniversary archery by an hour. I took some of my favourite portraits of the year, ate burrata on our new balcony, saw bad theatre and good cinema, and tried to recapture the Finnish sauna experience in Hackney Wick.

top film: Nope - the flying saucer IS the alien?? No one is doing it like Jordan Peele.
top book: Children of Paradise by Camilla Grudova, a Gothic tale of a crumbling cinema and its crumbling workers
top art: the Surrealism retrospective at Tate Modern, inspiring this cake
top TV: A League of Their Own - runner up for TV of the year
top podcast: Code Switch, a brilliant podcast on race from NPR

september

An ochre and aperatif-infused weekend in Bologna courtesy of a kind gift from my godfather. The pasta! The colours. We opened our home for two glorious weeks to a cat that has now departed this mortal coil. I worked on a collaborative art piece with a student from the Slade which I’m not sure will ever come to fruition due to the opaque mechanics of UCL, but was nonethless illuminating. I shot my first wedding in a while and had a really nice time, squeezed in some final sessions before the rain took over. Focussing my photography into making photos that writers are excited to put inside their books has been a highlight of this year - at least 3 should be hitting shelves in 2023.

top film: The Lighthouse, first film of a total lighthouse obsession I developed in the autumn
top book: Lighthouse by Tony Parker, an anthropology of lighthouse keepers; see above
top art: Abigail Brown’s paper-mache animal sculptures in the Walthamstow Wetlands
top TV: Severance, certainly the best title sequence of the year
top theatre: Vinay Patel’s Cherry Orchard at The Yard because I love a spaceship produced on a budget
top podcast: Hoaxed, another gripping piece of investigative journalism from Tortoise who have fast become my favourite media platform

The Chilehause in Hamburg shot on iPhone - I’ve developed no film since September.

october

A challenging, chaotic and fabulous month: a return to university combined with an international conference in The Netherlands for work. The rare joy of hugging colleagues from other continents after a year of Zoom; conversations over beers covering indigenous entrepreneurship support to comparisons of Peruvian and Colombian party culture; remembering the value of in-person collaboration while dancing to afrobeats. Looking back it seems this month simply must have been more than four weeks long as I also spent weekends with cousins in Brussels and Amsterdam, looking at miniature things in Hamburg with Haniah (which took seven trains from Den Haag, no regrets), glamping in the Surrey Hills with friends, testing the lidos of Bristol. I think I took my camera out once.

top book: The Shipping News by Anne Prudeaux, originally picked up for the lighthouse on the cover (see above), but a perfect example of a very gripping novel in which very little happens
top art: the Royal Africa Museum in Brussels, a fascinating and mixed attempt by a deeply colonial institution to interrogate its history. also Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg, wow
top TV: The Essex Serpent, misty marshland and Very Stressed Clare Danes
top performance: Anatolian songs at Hamburg’s Elbephilharmonie building, in which the performer dedicated his set to the women of Iran and the almost entirely Turkish audience sang with him throughout
top podcast: Normal Gossip, because I simply do not have enough gossip in my life and it perfectly scratches the itch

november

Revelling in autumn even though it was unseasonably warm in a scary way. I squeezed in final portraits with a Very Good Sport in plummeting temperatures, slipping out of a fantastically weird lecture series by the London Fortean Society - an afternoon schedule that speaks to the self I most aspire towards. I became a supporter of the Bat Conservation Trust, and I look forward to a bat-filled 2023. We went to Norfolk and saw seals and otters and birds and stomped around marshland and ancient churches and had unbelievably festive experiences in small fishing towns. We enjoyed time with friends in the East Midlands on such a cellular level that we wanted to organise another weekend immediately. I found the work-study-life balance the most difficult it’s been so far. There felt like a lot of life to be lived away from my desk.

top film: Foraging in the London Palestine Film Festival
top book: The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid for my book club, delicious trash with a suprisingly nuanced take on bisexuality
top art: the magic Christmas lights experience at Belton House, a stately home in Grantham
top TV: The White Lotus (Season 2)
top theatre: Company Three at the Yard (half of the theatre I saw this year was at The Yard, plus ca change)
top podcast: this year’s Reith Lectures, which have provided huge food for thought

December
Mulling wine and pine tree smells and low hymns and a hot kitchen and raucous carols on assorted instruments and baking and snow and baking and Oxford in the clear-skied frost and dog-sitting and endless crafting in candlelight and ice block toes during women’s football and finally making it to Amsterdam to be with my family for Christmas and evenings by the fire and consuming piles and piles of good books and awful films. A year that burst at the seams. I am grateful, I am optimistic, I am trepidatious. I will take more photos in 2023.

top book: Lighthousekeeping by Jeanette Wintersen; see above
top film: Le Pupille, a diamond in an enjoyable rubbish heap of Hallmark Christmas movies, and Corsage at the BFI, sneaking in under the wire of 2023
top art: Donavon Smallwood at Foam in Amsterdam
top TV: Hjem til Juul, a shockingly compelling Norwegian Christmas show
top podcast: Work Appropriate, lots of food for thought here to take into the new year

blog