Alex Wheatley On Feeling Our Seasons Through Film

Sat in Alex Wheatley’s living room, a few weeks after she’d opened her home to me because I’d had to leave mine suddenly, I noticed an Urth box. I’d been noticing clues to a life cluttered with cameras for a while now, but I hadn’t spoken to Alex about her photography. Stalking my own friend on social media, I was arrested by a side to her that I was yet to know. A side which captures timeless images of the natural world in a way that will make you want to run until you reach a fire in the sand at low tide. A side that documents what Alex loves about life, in a palette that speaks softly and strongly about who she is. Because, as she constantly reminds me, both are possible at once.

“I think I have a really bad memory,” Alex confesses into a cup of tea. We’re sitting on her sofa, a place we often share stories from before we knew each other, so it’s not a claim I’d immediately corroborate.

“For me, taking photos is a visual journal,” she tells me. “When I was a teenager, it became obvious that I really struggled with anxiety. Particularly social anxiety. I couldn’t remember things like days out, parties and holidays for anything other than how I felt. Which meant I was losing a lot of time. But taking photos holds memories more objectively for me. The camera puts me outside of the situation whilst keeping me a part of it. I’m not worrying about what’s going to happen next, or what I look like, or what people think of me.”

“Thirteen is a weird age to move from South London to Hong Kong,” she shrugs obviously. “My new high school was all bells and lockers and canteens and I felt like I’d stepped onto the set of something. All that change and adjustment makes your memory quite spotty because you’re overstimulated. Initially, I didn’t deal with that overwhelm in particularly healthy ways.

“I think the camera acted as a shield which helped to focus what I was dealing with. Hong Kong is very busy and you can be in one area and think What am I doing? Am I shopping? Am I just looking around? Am I sightseeing? Do I need to find somewhere to eat? Whereas if I went out with the objective of taking some photos of a cool place, I did all of the above. I was talking, I was exploring, and it wasn’t stressful.”

Film photography became a self-regulating technique which cracked the glaze of Alex’s anxiety. She loved that you can’t do it twice. She loved knowing you’ve only got 36 photos on a roll. She loved the sound. The mechanical cogs and clunks, the shutter and winding the film on. Her dad had given her her first camera, and the gift was no shot in the dark on his part.

“My dad is a fairly classic example of an incredibly creative person who became a banker,” she laughs. “He took photos of his own youth on film and he’s got huge folders of negatives and rolls of film that have never been developed. He even built a dark room in our house to develop his photos himself, and sometimes he’d even paint them.”

The house that Alex and I sit in for this interview is one she shares with her partner JJ, but it’s dotted with furniture made by her dad. His kitchen bench, record stand and wooden coffee table meld with his daughter’s eye for deep green drawers and ceramic lamps. “My dad taught me that I can visualise what I want something to look like. He can picture something and then make it,” she says.

Alex’s dad allegedly took the camera off of his own wedding photographer because he didn’t think they were getting the right kind of photos. He didn’t want posed portraits, but human moments. The groom wanted to capture Alex and her sister stealing petals off the iced daisies on the cake, his niece getting her balloon tangled in a tree, and his elder daughter gossiping with an aunt. His shots are the ones that people love all these years later. Naturally, having a keen photographer for a father means that Alex’s childhood was a well-documented one. But her role as photographer began when she tired of being the subject.

“I think I probably reached a point in Hong Kong where I was refusing to be in a lot of dad’s photos. I felt uncomfortable because I had a degree of body dysmorphia and I was also just a grumpy teenager who didn’t want to be in family photos any more. If you think about the language surrounding photography it can be quite intrusive. You “shoot” a photo for instance. For a teenager who’s trying to figure out how they want to be seen in the world, giving them ownership of that is the best thing you can do as a parent. My dad thought it was a good time for me to start independently documenting my life and to become the architect of these images.”

One of Alex’s very first cameras was an Olympus Om1 and she still shoots on it to this day. It’s precious to her but she’s not precious about it. Rather than keeping it bubble wrapped in the loft, she throws it in her rucksack and uses it out in the wild. “It's broken a couple of times. I've fixed it using everything from YouTube videos, to performing surgery with little dental tools, to hunting down ancient camera specialists in tiny backstreets. It just keeps going!”

Whilst her dad loved photographing people, Alex’s subject is nature. Despite being a Londoner, this girl began erecting her own tent, building fires and axing wood from the age of eight. Before this, she remembers holidays down in Devon with her aunt, uncle and cousins.

“There were six of us and we would just run around like barefoot ragamuffins,” she grins. “We’d pack a lunch and go outside all day (on auntie’s orders) and be back at 4. We’d disappear off to the woods with butterfly nets and strict instructions not to let Olivia, the littlest one, drown. Barefoot, we’d build dens and fish for fairies.” Alex remembers one particular day that they built a boat to sail to an island in the middle of a pond. The boat was an old sandpit which sank them into pondweed. Olivia, who hadn’t been allowed on the boat, got pissed off that she’d been left out and cut a chunk of her hair off and hid it under the sofa.

“All of my favourite childhood memories are independent time outdoors,” Alex says. She has no problem remembering these chapters of her life, which weren’t always photographed but were too covered in mud to be corrupted by overthinking. “My other grandmother lived down on the south coast and we’d spend our days rockpooling. We used to collect all the little creatures in a bucket and put them in a seawater bath for the day. Eels, starfish, little prawns….we’d study them before returning them to the wild”

From my experience in the outdoors with Alex, I’ve learned her ability to make anonymous spaces feel like home. On adventures that might just last a few hours, she has a knack of making cosy nooks on exposed beaches with one picnic blanket, a small fire in the stones, and a careless ease about whatever the weather might do. In her images, she captures the wind-whipped cliffs and the warmth of the kettle on the stove. She carves momentary poems in natural spaces, before letting their rhymes wash away with the tide, leaving the land unspoilt. I ask her what, beyond its aesthetic, she appreciates about spending time in the wild.

“I like being reminded that nature is all about cycles. Everything has a cycle of growth and decay, which counters consumerist ideas that everything needs to be available and at the same level all the time - including us,” Alex says. “If you look at nature, literally nothing is the same all the time. Even mountains, which we might think of as unchanging, don’t remain in a hyper productive state. If we could recognise that, I think we’d be able to find more peace with the times that we don’t feel like we’re ‘living our best life’. Instead we’d recognise that we’re just in a different state of our cycle, and give ourselves grace to change, whether that is growing or decaying.”

No natural cycle greets us as clearly as the seasons. Most of us tend to survive winter, scamper into spring, yearn for summer and soak back into autumn. Alex admits that she used to be guilty of wishing away winter, but these days she tries to flirt with dreary February afternoons as zealously as she succumbs to June’s long evenings.

“When you stop and look, winter has got some amazing elements. There’s so much peace in bleak skeletal landscapes. They have a sense of hushed hibernation, but are ultimately as fleeting as a sunny August,” she says.

“I think that being present in the seasons is really healthy and helps you to create a parallel in your own life. You can do yourself more of a disservice by trying to rage through an emotion or period of your life that is not ready to be raged through. And actually approaching situations with a little bit more gentleness and kindness to yourself is ok. That’s not to say don’t be proactive about making good changes in your life, but these don’t have to be immediate. And they’re very unlikely to be immediate. Nothing in the natural world happens without preparation. I’m trying to remember that and have peace with things taking a bit of time, and finding some hope and beauty in the process.”

The physicality of how humans and nature intersect features heavily in Alex’s photography. Whether she’s hiking through it, swimming in it or sleeping on it — it’s never just about looking at landscapes. Alex is a woman fortified by the winds she’s worn, stoked by fires she’s made, and calmed by the waters she’s been suspended in. Her parley with the elements is as important to her as taking pictures of them. She loves rugged coastlines the most.

“There’s the clifftop gorse, which is like this magic plant a kid made up - it makes great kindling and smells like coconut!” she lists excitedly. “Then there’s purply heather which offers a springy mattress for weary campers. And below you have the beaches which reveal two entirely different worlds when the tide comes in and out”. Hearing the chemistry she shares with the natural world, I ask Alex how other people can climb into her photos for the same sensation.

“I’ve always struggled with feelings of overwhelm, especially around decisions, and there’s nothing like a cold water dunk to get you out of your own head,” she prescribes. “Either that, a hike up a mountain or a good cry by the ocean always brings me into my physical, rather than mental, space. Even if you don’t fix anything, it can be really powerful for giving yourself a break. Getting uncomfortable in the outdoors also reminds you what you’re capable of,” she adds. “You’re reminded that you can literally move yourself into a different situation. That’s very powerful if you feel that you’re being held hostage by decisions. Stress and anxiety are often born of a feeling of not being in control, so to take control and say ‘I’m going to jump in the fucking sea’ helps leave that anxiety on the shore.”

When Alex and her partner JJ invited me to stay with them at the start of this year, I’d never felt so out of control in my life. I was riddled with self-doubt after finally standing up to emotional abuse, a move that had cost me my home. Separately, I was dealing with heartbreak, I was overworked and, despite being surrounded by good people, I was indescribably lonely. I didn’t know what any big pictures looked like and the little ones flashing in front of me were not pretty. But, I took Alex’s advice. Together with her, JJ and their dog Yena, we planned some short trips to south-west England. They all lasted less than a day, but we took our swim stuff, and we got in. We carried kettles to cliff paths for sunsets and ate crumble out of the pan for breakfast at the beach. We made wild corners home for small winks of time, and I stretched. My year has seen no clearer moments than those cold water dunks in the wooded rivers of Exmoor and misty dawns of Somerset sea pools. Those moments gave me my body back, and closed the miles between me and myself. It’s not a feeling I’m likely to ever forget, but just in case I do, I have the reassuring sound of Alex���s shutter to keep those memories safe.