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.
The set-ups of the photographs and captions started to merge their histories – particularly their shared issues with religion – to ask questions about mental health and human connection. Turner calls his pictures “The Divided Self”. He half-imagines the series might go on until both he and Ivan “are pensioners sitting on a bench somewhere”.
“Place is important to Ivan,” Turner says. “The picture with Foggy [the sheep] is typical. When he got his caravan he bought four sheep to live on the land. When he was away he asked some neighbouring travellers to look after the sheep on the understanding that they would keep them away from the ram. They clearly failed. There are now about 12 sheep on Ivan’s land.” The picture comes with a quote from the book of Isaiah: “He tends his flock like a shepherd: He gathers the lambs in his arms and carries them close to his heart.”
