Fergus Heron, Charles Church Houses, selected works 2004-2010 portfolio

Charles Church Houses is an ongoing series of photographic works that depict modern family houses, and their immediate environment, built in various English architectural historical styles by the Surrey based property developer Charles Church. The question that underpins these works is how the house, as a feature of the everyday domestic built environment, and, as an image, can manifest tensions between perceived tradition and modernity, culture and nature, and, how these tensions can be represented through photography. Fergus Heron uses a large format view camera to make these highly organised pictures, and, to reference the early technologies and histories of photography in the nineteenth century. Early experiments in the development of the medium by Niepce, Daguerre and Fox Talbot took place almost exclusively in and around the space of the house. Elements of domestic space featured often as the main subject of many early photographs including the landscape. These pictures therefore aim to offer reflection upon their own form and its history, and, upon notions of ʻHouseʼ and ʻHomeʼ - both domestic and national. In connection, they complicate distinctions between real and imagined place, construct an illusion of a past brought uncannily into the present, and, foreground the historical significance of the everyday environment.