This is an Instagram collaboration with @nickybelton, whom I met in Belfast when she was working there on a film project, and I was back visiting family for the summer.
I love the city of my birth, but have a complicated relationship with it; I am fiercely proud of being from there, but having not lived there for 23 years, feel like a stranger when I visit. Nor is it even the same city of 'The Troubles' in which I grew up, but yet I cannot help but feel strangely drawn back to it every time I return, however difficult I know living in it would now undoubtedly be.
Conversely, Nicky had never been there, but fell in love with it when she spent four months living and working there two years ago, and has developed a special relationship with the city since then, visiting regularly. In different ways we are both exiles when we are there, and decided to blend together our images of the same Belfast seen through different eyes for this @echosight Instagram takeover.
Blending is a simultaneously frustrating and rewarding process, and sometimes it works better than other times, sometimes not at all; sometimes there's just a beautiful synchronicity between two images. Similarly, there is sometimes a beautiful synchronicity between two photographers, and some images demonstrate that better than any explanation; they just feel 'right'.