Tanya Houghton: A Migrant's Tale

Photograph Description 1
A Migrant’s Tale is a collection of narrative explorations of home and nostalgia, told through the language of food. The body of work represents a collaborative reworking process of the migrant’s tale, which explores the relationship of the narrator and the interpreter, and the use of photography in creating a visual retelling of the migrant's story.

Photograph Description 2
Ten Migrants living and working in London were interviewed about their relationship to food, narrating their stories, tales of home and their motherland. Exploring their use of food in their daily routines and the ability to use this as an access point to their homeland.

Photograph Description 3
Through a decoding process their stories were reduced to series of objects and food items, sitting alongside donated photographs from the participants and their family. Still life shrines were created through a visual reinterpretation of the stories they had told. The Shrine sits alongside a portrait of the migrant and is accompanied by a text panel of quotations taken from the interview.

Photograph Description 4
The work challenges the concept of home being created through multiple groundings of fixed geographical points, by exploring the notion of home as an amalgamation of rituals performed through routine practices of the every day; practices through which one is able to perform a cognitive migration, traveling to and from an internal home carried within.

Photograph Description 5
Aided by the memory’s ability to archive interrelated images and the need for the generational retelling of tales of ancestry, the stories we tell ultimately live on through our daily practice and celebration of the food we choose to cook.

Photographer's Profile
Tanya Houghton is a social documentary photographer based in London. Having studied a B.A in Fashion Photography at London College of Fashion she recently completed an M.A in Photography and Urban Cultures at Goldsmiths, shaping the framework for her own interdisciplinary practice. She often mixes landscape, portrait and object work, to tell her narrative and explore the use of the image as an object.