Mark “This photo was shot in July 1987. My practise as a photographer has always been an exploration which both informs and has  been informed by my own politics, and having spent most of my life living in the NE of England, documenting places like Easington and seeing the social consequences of deindustrialisation and neglect, it has given me a perspective which often doesn’t fit well into the ‘liberal’ mindset. I voted remain in the EU referendum of 2016, not out of any particular love for a European project that needs reform. As the culture wars around Brexit became increasingly ugly, I watched in dismay as the issues became more and more polarised as the fundamentalists on both sides of leave and remain tore chunks out of each other in an ever more brutal game of winner takes all. When the remainers started to wheel out characters like Michael Heseltine or Blair as hero’s of remain, the man who helped destroy the communities of East Durham when he finally shut the pits in the early 90s, I realised just how out of touch and insensitive they’d become. The kind of insensitivity to the lived realities of so many that allowed the ugly political narratives of Trump or Johnson to take hold amongst so many to whom being lectured on their stupidity by a man who destroyed their communities and left them scavenging the beach for coal looked like a sick joke. We were played for suckers over Brexit.”