There’s something quietly radical about the work of British photographer Oliver Farshi. His projects don’t chase spectacle—they reveal what’s often hidden: grief, dying, vulnerability, and the spaces we rarely speak about. This year, Farshi’s series A Place to Die earned global recognition from World Press Photo, honouring his ability to balance intimacy and distance with remarkable grace. We caught up with Oliver to explore his creative process, emotional storytelling, and what photography can do that words simply can’t.
Your work often enters spaces that are hidden from public view. What draws you to these intimate and often difficult human moments?
What’s interesting to me, at least for the time being, are elements of our regular, everyday lives that are in some way familiar but often very private or remain unspoken. These commonalities that bind us together but for whatever reason we’re unwilling or unable to share with each other. Death is one of the big ones.
We’re spectacularly aware of death–predominantly through images of war and disaster, and also through an abundance of violent entertainment–but we’re less familiar with a more domestic, quiet sort of death. Death is ultimately one of the most profoundly human experiences, it will happen to each one of us, yet somehow we’re painfully unfamiliar with it.
In A Place to Die, you captured people during one of life’s most private transitions. How did you earn their trust, and how did the experience affect you personally?
My work doesn’t begin with making photographs. Often there’s a lot of conversation that happens before even a single frame is made. This can be challenging as I tend to be interested in people and practices that operate behind closed doors or on the fringes of some fundamental aspect of culture or society.
Making these photographs has changed me. Like many people, I was terrified of death and dying. I’d often spend time worrying about my final moments. Working on a story about death was a way for me to confront this fear and to become intimate with death. In many ways I think I did this. I’m no longer afraid of death, or perhaps a better way to put this is that I have an abundantly healthy fear of death. I don’t want to die, I very much want to live, and this sense of comfort and reverence with death that in turn allows me to get stuck into the stuff of life and living.
Grief and loss appear as recurring themes in your projects. What do you think photography can offer that words alone cannot in these emotional landscapes?
Loss is democratic. Noone–no matter their privilege–can escape it in their lifetime. Although it’s not meted out fairly, loss is fundamental to the human experience and it’s something that many of us go out of our way to avoid or try to mitigate. When we finally meet loss, our response is often grief.
So, these experiences of loss and grief are absolutely intertwined. They are both fundamental parts of what it is to be human. However because we have so much aversion to loss and grief, we perhaps don’t spend much time reflecting on them. For me, the ubiquity of loss and grief paired with our aversion to them, makes them utterly fascinating to explore.
When you feel a sense of emptiness and loss just by looking at a photograph, you’re touching on something important and universal about what it is to be human. To conjure up that experience in a felt sense, rather than using words, is sort of magical to me.
You move between journalism and fine art storytelling — how do you balance documentation with creative interpretation in your visual language?
Journalism and fine art storytelling are both ways of making sense of our experience of the world. I think they exist on some kind of continuum of intended objectivity, where there’s an objective truth and a subjective truth with some fuzzy shared space in-between.
Sometimes people describe the aspiration with photojournalism as a kind of total objectivity. There’s an idea that photojournalists are meant to be reaching towards an ultimate state of objective truth — the problem is that this is unattainable. Every act on the part of the photographer, beginning with showing up with the camera, is a choice that changes some aspect of what is there. I still think that, despite all of that, this work is a pursuit of truth.
With my work on death, I was thinking a lot about how to communicate the feeling of what it was, for me, to be in this unique house that is dedicated to death and dying. I think the emotional space one occupies in a place like that is such a big part of understanding the house itself. So it’s pointedly not a forensic examination, I’m not creating images that simply show what is there. I’m often standing with the camera, letting the lens slowly pass over the space, seeing the image reflected on the glass, noticing when some ineffable feeling arises, and then choosing to push the shutter release.
As a British photographer working in the U.S., how has distance from your roots shaped the way you see and tell human stories?
I’ve lived in the U.S. for around 15 years now. Even though it’s been a substantial part of my adult life, in many ways I still feel like an outsider. I think this is a good thing. I’m fascinated with so much about this country and I’m constantly asking, “Why is that thing this way?”
Underneath everything, although the culture is very different—and in fact it’s many cultures overlapping and intermingling—these are humans, these stories are human stories, and the underlying themes map to a more common and connected idea of the human experience. It’s just playing out in this fascinating, chaotic, uniquely American way.
Your portraits reveal vulnerability without spectacle. How do you decide when to take a photograph and when to simply witness?
I think the question for me is not when do I press the shutter and make an exposure, but should I press the shutter and make an exposure? Often I think about a line from one of my favorite films, The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty, “If I like a moment, sometimes I don’t like to have the distraction of the camera.” Sometimes moments are just for me, or us, in the room.
I studied portraiture at SVA with the great Algis Balsys, who died earlier this year. He taught me how important it is not to hurry into making the photograph. When I’m making a portrait with someone, often we’ll just sit, we’ll breathe together, talk a little, wait. There’s a lot of spaciousness that needs to happen to get rid of the formality of the moment so that something true can reveal itself.
Winning the World Press Photo award is a major milestone. Has that recognition changed the way you approach new projects or how you engage with your subjects?
Our time is so limited and so for me to work on a photo story I have to feel very strongly about the topic in some way. With death and dying, it was of massive existential concern to me. I worried about my own death a lot. I wanted to find a way to become intimate with the idea of death and dying. Ultimately what I learned was that we can live better– in a more present and profound way–if we’re able to die better.
The recognition of World Press Photo is validation that I’m on the right path. For me, it’s a signal that the stories I’m interested in exploring are interesting to other people too, and that they’re worthy of greater reflection and able to spark conversation.
Many of your stories unfold in private, interior worlds. What role does environment — whether a home, a hospice, or a memory — play in shaping your photographic narrative?
I grew up in Manchester in the 1980s. It hadn’t been rejuvenated yet and so it was sort of this mashup of post-industrial landscapes, bleak fields, rainy streets with old brick houses, and the grim, original Arndale Center at the middle of it all. I remember gazing through windows into empty office spaces at night: the bright synthetic strip lighting illuminating rooms with those old yellow-stained vertical blinds. I discovered that just the act of looking at these spaces would make me feel a certain way.
I want to keep returning to this felt sense of places and moments. It’s very childlike. It was innate and somehow more immediately accessible when I was just a boy, and making photographs is an opportunity to nurture that way of feeling the world. As an adult, the truly incredible thing to me is that somehow I can communicate this sense of place and moment to others, not through words, but in photographs. To make a photograph that communicates how I feel continues to be utterly magical to me, beyond chemistry.