Orrin is a young artist & photographer Blackburn Lancashire, currently based in Manchester. His personal practice centres around documentary portraiture - particularly in creating long term socially engaged documentary projects around certain groups or individuals. He primarily works with analogue equipment, which both helps him to engage with his subjects through the slow and intimate workflow, while also creating the aesthetic present throughout his work.
In september of 2020, shortly prior to the reinstating of the national lockdown, I was invited in passing to travel across the country with a family friend to stay for a while in an apple orchard in Iden.
In Norse mythology, Iðunn (Idunn) was the goddess of rejuvenation and the coming of spring. She was the keeper of the sacred apples of imortality, which the gods ate to preserve their youth.
I’d like to imagine that the little village along the south coast derives its name from the Norse goddess, and though I couldnt find any concrete evidence to back this up it still felt like too close of a coincidence to ignore. And to myself and many of the people there, it was indeed a little garden of freedom and youth away from the word.
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###I can add more to this into about the actual project, but the image ‘bios’ speak for themselves (I think?) and this introduction is quiite poetic in a way on its own
The brighton bunch were camped together at the far side of the orchard. I’d met two of them - the brothers Leo and Eli - the previous year. Leo had recently bought a horse trailer which he was converting into a live-in space, though he’d yet to find a car to tow it with.
‘The Brighton Bunch’ at their camp, September 2022
The first time I visited the orchard I spent a lot of time with Mai. Her mum, Ana, had dug out their old camera - a Twin Lens Reflex - from when she was at college. I had some spare film with me, so in the mornings I’d be out in the trees picking, and in the evenings I was giving Mai photography lessons.
When I went back last septemer, Mai had started to grow out of her younger playful self. She’d become rather camera-shy, and commandeered a trailer of her own and started making youtube videos. She lives together with her parents Ana & Dave in their trucks, along with her older brother.You might find this lifestyle perculiar and interesting but to her and her brother this was simply thw way they’d always grown up.
In June they traveled down south for the picking season, and then returned back to wales, working the winter planting trees. Her brother Brân was thinking of staying down south this winter - he’d got into kickboxing and was looking at renting a flat in Hastings, though it’d be quite a drastic change of lifestyle
Ana and Dave both rebelled against their parents and traditional upbringings, and in their turn, their children have begun to ‘rebel’ back towards a more traditional lifestyle. Maybe the need to push back against your upbringing is inevitable, regardless of it being traditional or not
I met Phil coming back from the picking one day. We bonded over our mutual attire - wearing raincoats in the heat of the day.You might find this odd, but the trees are so dense with branches that in order to protect yourself and your arms, a raincoat was often your best bet.
‘grumpy old’ Phil had been a bit of a staple at the orchard. Most people come and go with the picking season, but Phil had been camped there for the past three years. He told me about his family in Bali - he hadn’t seen them since before lockdown and the travel restrictions still hadn’t been lifted. He told me stories of all the places he’d been - often finding himself solitary one way or another. Once owning a little cottage in the (*irish?*) hillside with his dog on the outskirts of a little village. Though he is content with his own company, and he finds a sense of company in other ways, I still got the feeling that he finds it lonely living out in the orchard alone most of the year
Anna showing me a photograph of Dave when he was younger.
‘other images’
Leo and Eli coming back from the fields ‘other images’
Eddie, farmhand of 40 years, playing the dobro at my camp ‘other images’
