[The Guardian] The big picture: the healing power of connection

The big picture: the healing power of connection

Photographer Greg Turner’s tender portraits of Ivan explore the pair’s overlapping personal struggles

Greg Turner first met Ivan on Horsham High Street in 2017. Turner was taking pictures of passersby and Ivan stopped to ask him about them. Something about Ivan intrigued Turner. “He gave the impression of being homeless,” he suggests, “but also he clearly looked after himself.” Turner took Ivan’s picture and over the year or two that followed the pair would see each other quite often. Turner got to fill in some of Ivan’s story: he lived alone – dividing his time between a flat outside town and in a caravan on a scrap of land he had bought – and suffered from a form of psychosis that meant he was plagued by voices in his head. But he was also relentlessly positive, a friendly face to many in the town.

At the beginning of lockdown, Turner’s marriage had just broken down and he found himself visiting and photographing Ivan more often. “I realised what I was doing in my portraits of Ivan was channelling memories of the vulnerabilities of my own difficult childhood into Ivan’s life as a vulnerable adult,” Turner says.

See more of Greg Turner’s photography on his website

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