Federico Clavarino is a photographer and teacher based in London. His works revolve around issues of power, history and representation. Published as a book by Skinnerboox in 2019, “Hereafter” is a documentary project, based on the story of Clavarino’s grandparents.

For over thirty years, John and Mary Phillips worked in the Sudan, Libya, Oman, Jordan and Cyprus. “They witnessed the progressive decline of the British Empire, in which they had lived since childhood and which shaped their view of the world”, Clavarino describes. Using recovered letters, photographs, documents and memoirs as a guide, he embarked on a photographic journey, documenting the places where his grandparents once lived and worked.

Ultimately, Clavarino explains, “Hereafter” is “an attempt at deconstructing the family’s narrative, one imbued by colonial discourse, and at doing so by locking past images into a dialectical relationship with contemporary images, thus showing how the Empire still lives on as a ghostly presence or an inherited symptom”.

See more from “Hereafter” below!