How Alfie Whiteman – professional footballer turned photographer and director – reveals the turbulence of change by means of his susceptible work

Creative expression turned an essential, grounding outlet for Alfie and so it is smart that he turned to it when his life felt so unrecognisable – being flown 1,200 miles away from his capital metropolis house to a tiny rural city with a inhabitants of lower than 10,000 individuals to work and practice with a bunch of individuals he didn’t know – all of the whereas doubting the longevity of his profession at Tottenham. While in Sweden, Alfie was consistently in search of an outlet, a cause to select up his digital camera, and he remembers the precise second he discovered the proper subject material to lens in on. “There’s this loophole in Sweden where you can drive a tractor at 14,” Alfie explains. “Teenagers would mod these EPA tractors to make them look like mini American pickup trucks.” Enamoured with subculture, Alfie was determined to make a documentary about it, however – amongst his busy coaching schedule – it was unattainable to seek out the time.

Instead, Alfie discovered himself taking images of “the bloody sunset” from a jetty he’d grow to be keen on spending time on, earlier than he realised the world had sufficient scenic sundown screensavers, and he wasn’t utilizing his digital camera to say what he really wished to. Then, someday, he was sitting on the jetty within the midst of a storm “and I found myself asking ‘What am I doing here? This is so sad, what a sad picture this would be!’”. he recollects. And that’s precisely what he did – he took an image. And so started a interval of artistic exploration, testing the boundaries and expansiveness of the self-portraiture type, which resulted in over 600 pictures, which, on the time, Alfie had no intention of ever letting anybody else see.

It’s exceptional how little reference to soccer there may be within the collection; when you entered the exhibition with no prior context, you’d possible haven’t any clue it’s from the thoughts’s eye of knowledgeable participant. Alfie ignored recommendations to {photograph} his life as a footballer, the altering room and the regimented life it entails, as a result of “it kind of defeats the purpose of a personal project, that would have been for the audience,” he says. Portraits as a substitute present Alfie between a sparse residing house, woodlands and the aforementioned jetty, unclothed and in varied states of vulnerability, with scenes typically veering into surreal and uncanny realms. In one shot, half of his physique protrudes from an industrial washer – sucked in by an unknown drive? Or desperately escaping actuality by means of any means doable?