“Cockneys still exist”: Eileen Jamieson’s photo series is a love letter to her family and the east end

Photographer Eileen Jamieson didn’t realise how much being a cockney and being a Londoner meant to her until she left home at 20 to move to Bristol and study filmmaking at University of the West of England. “No one at university spoke like me and I often felt like I couldn’t relate to other people because their life experiences were so different to mine,” she shares. And so, her documentary photo project Where You’re Supposed To Be – a series centred on her father John and their shared cockney identity – sprung from a strong desire to be understood and to be seen. “I think I created it to almost justify myself,” the photographer says, “to explain to people why I’m different – this is my culture and these are my parents is why I am the way I am.”

At first, Eileen registered for a course at art school for the sole purpose of moving out of her family’s house and finding her independence. After emerging from her filmmaking BA with an appetite for image making, Eileen pursued an MA course in Photography and started the photo series. To document her father and educate people about the east end of London came from a handful of visits back home from Bristol over the years, where it “seemed like he had aged unbelievably rapidly”, she says. “It might be strange, but I would say the sign that it was the correct time to make this project was the realisation of my dad’s mortality. I wanted to make a photo project of him before it was too late.”

Holding the cockney label much more to heart than her siblings, this shared sense of identity is something Eileen has always bonded with her father over. So it seemed pretty natural to make it a focus point of a photo project. The series set out to explore themes of “class, connection and the complexities of parent/child relationships”, says Eileen, who thought the best approach was to start by shooting absolutely everything she could on 10 hour round trips back home. “I had to commute five hours each way when shooting this project. I couldn’t justify the price of a hotel in London and my parents don’t have a sofa for me to sleep on,” she says, “so I would commute to London and back to Bristol everyday.”

To generate enough material to work with from each trip, Eileen would shoot excessively, documenting “everything worth photographing”. She also followed her dad around all of the places that she grew up in East Ham: “the high street, the park, my families house… (there’s actually not much to photograph in Newham!).” Set across the backdrop of east end London, these snapshots of the everyday – from old pie and mash signs to market stalls and tattered overground seats – will be warmly familiar to anyone that grew up on this side of the city. But Eileen’s portrait of the place she calls home is also imbued with the kind of complex nostalgia that only comes from a long time away: “I’m showing my own connection to a culture and a family, I’m all but removed from it.”

One of the photographer’s favourites from the photo series is a portrait of her dad that she’s taken as he’s weighing up his muscles in the mirror: “My dad has always been this powerhouse of masculinity to me, when I was younger I believed he was the strongest and most intelligent man in the world. I’m much wiser now, and I can see him for all of his flaws and downfalls, but he’ll always be my childhood dad to me.”

Another image of her dad in his work van – a man who’s been a painter and decorator “for longer than I’ve been alive” – has stayed with Eileen as an encapsulation of the kind of observations the reflective photo project unfolded. “I’ve seen countless work vans come and go during my childhood and I’ve never documented them before”, she says. “I wanted to remember this moment of time, my dad at this exact age, this exact van and the state he kept it in. You’re looking at him and he’s looking straight back at you, surprised that you’re spying on him.”