Powerful portrait projects

Chris Porsz

Chris Porsz began his interest in photography while hitchhiking across Europe and North Africa in the early 1970s. He started shooting images of people on the streets of Peterborough in the early 1980s. Years later this led to a newspaper column and an ambitious project that saw him photographing the same people again, sometimes over 40 years apart. www.chrisporsz.com

Chris Porsz’s project dates back to the early 1980s when he ‘wandered around the streets of Peterborough with my camera’. But the arrival of children, and a busy career as a paramedic, put his photography on hold for almost 25 years.

He admits he, ‘sort of fell out of love with photography’, but his passion was rekindled in 2009 when he sent some old images of Peterborough in the 1980s to the local paper, the Peterborough Evening Telegraph. Chris reveals, ‘Amazingly, they loved them and they gave me a column – Paramedic Paparazzo.’

Some local people started recognising themselves in the published pictures and Chris had his ‘lightbulb moment’, when he asked himself ‘perhaps I can find them?’ That long search began in 2009. When possible, he photographed the people in the exact same location and pose he’d originally shot them in. ‘What got me going again was digital. The fact that you could instantly see your images and take as many as you want.’

The work was published in the 2016 book, but that wasn’t the end of the matter… Chris decided to continue. After retiring as a paramedic – as the first book had left quite a few people still to be re-photographed. By this time his journey through cameras had taken him from a Kodak Instamatic camera to the Canon EOS 5D Mark III with a 24-70mm lens. He admits, ‘I also wanted to bring those 1980s mono pictures alive to a certain extent.’