Solitude: A Diary of a Place - Stephanie R Jones

Solitude: A Journey to Northey Island is a response to the brief “Creative as Anthropologist”. It began with a simple aim - pick a destination completely unknown to you, visit it and produce a piece of work that represents the people and place. I chose Northey Island, a tiny island located in the middle of an estuary of the River Blackwater in Essex.

I’d read briefly about the place, but the only information I found was that it was very small, accessible by a causeway and had two inhabitants. I was fascinated by these two inhabitants - I assumed they were a couple, but if not, who would choose to live on an island with someone else? What sort of life did they have?

Although I took a DSLR with me, on looking back at the photos and footage I’d taken, I found that the candid images I took on a series of disposable cameras perfectly encapsulated my feelings about the place and my journey there. Grainy, out of focus, with a dreamlike colour palette, they capture Northey as I experienced it – an other-worldly place that was full of contradictions: straight-forward yet mysterious, in plain sight yet tricky to access. I documented my journey as I went, combining some written thoughts and the photographs taken in this zine.