Two Minutes up the Hill – Jamie Salmons

Everyone has a ‘hill’ in their life. For me, my experience of loss brought a sense of spirituality, and I began seeing my grandfather in objects and changes in the weather. I wanted this hill to represent this universal feeling that comes with grief.

Artist : Jamie Salmons

Series : Two Minutes up the Hill

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Developed as part of Jamie’s major project from London College of Communication, University of the Arts London.

Two Minutes up the Hill is, at its core, a documentary photography project. It details the lives and customs of my mother’s side of the family, and how they have changed after the death of my grandfather in early 2024. This was my first and only experience of loss at the time, and looking back, this project was my way of processing what had happened. I became profoundly aware of the tight-knit dynamic between my family home and my grandparent’s cottage, just a two minute walk away.

Through this series, I wanted to communicate ideas of familiarity, nostalgia and a sense of place. I posed the hill as an anthropomorphic metaphor; an unmoving, all-seeing, omniscient presence that watches over the village. Despite this, the lack of detail regarding location is intentional. By not giving away the names of the places or people in the series, the viewer is allowed to draw their own experiences upon the images. Everyone has a ‘hill’ in their life. For me, my experience of loss brought a sense of spirituality, and I began seeing my grandfather in objects and changes in the weather. I wanted this hill to represent this universal feeling that comes with grief.

The series builds upon my personal archive of film imagery. My first few rolls, using my family as test subjects, became increasingly significant in the lead up to my grandfather’s death. By integrating these into the book sequence, time is homogenised. Figures appear twice at different ages, landscapes are changed and weathered, the past converses with the present. The images were also taken with foresight. I constantly prompted myself to imagine which images would be of most interest in ten, thirty or fifty years. More often than not, it was not birthdays or Christmas celebrations, but a mundane conversation in the corridor, or an unexpected frosty morning in my Granny’s garden.

The book itself is designed to feel homely and lived in. The grey book-cloth is textured and rugged in the hand, and the screen-printed cover bares my Granny’s handwriting. The endpapers are wine red, a colour I associate heavily with my late grandfather, and one that appears many times in the book, most notably on the walls in Piano Room I. The book is crafted to feel somewhere between fiction and documentary, and the poem at the beginning of the book sets out this feeling for its remainder.

© Jamie Salmons – All rights reserved