In 2021, during a difficult period in his life, photographer Charlie Tallott turned to his camera, using it as an escape vessel and attempting to capture the feelings he couldn’t feel at the time. The result is “At least until the world stops going round,” a strikingly emotive project made up of vivid photos packed with energy and life. He tells Marigold Warner about his approach to photography and the feelings—both good and bad—that come with releasing such an intimately personal project into the world.
Charlie Tallott’s heart is in Yorkshire. “I’m a proper home-bird,” says the 23-year-old artist from Leeds. He moved to London five years ago to study, but football and family are important—“I go and watch Leeds a lot,” he says—so he’s up north most weekends. Even the title of his debut photobook, published by New Dimension, is from a Leeds United chant: “At least until the world stops going round.”
The book is deeply personal, and emerged from a dark time in Tallott’s life. In 2021, he was under the care of the NHS for three months following a suicide attempt, and was restricted to leaving the house for just one hour a day. “I was dying to get out,” he says, “so I started making a plan of what I wanted to feel. For that one outing a day, Tallott went hunting. His SLR became an “escape vessel” as he searched for “euphoric, blissful, utopian images…glimpses into feelings that I couldn’t feel at the time.”
These images are charged with a reckless, rapturous energy. Vivid amber sunsets, swans, people running naked in the street, or launching themselves high on a swing set. “Normally with photography, you’re waiting for the photos to come to you…but I knew exactly what I wanted to put through my lens,” he says. “It’s like a chase. You’re scrambling to find it. Once you do, there’s a buzz, like you’ve found a little sample of that feeling.”
In the book, these images are combined with photographs that date back to his first-ever roll of film, taken at 16 in his grandparents’ house, his town’s local snooker club, and the factories where his dad worked. The archive spans years, but there is a distinct style and an overarching grittiness—“a cloud of agitation or discomfort”—that cloaks the work. This is achieved with a bright flash, and dark-room processes like dodging, burning and solarization to achieve texture and noise. It’s also reflected in recurring motifs: scratches, bruises, fallen trees and warped metal railings.
It’s less about what he’s showing, and more about how the images feel. Tallott evokes an inner reality through his lens, a skill held by many of his influences, like Albert Elm, Ryan McGinley, and the Provoke-era photographers of post-war Japan. “You can sense the photographers’ vision in those images—their perspectives and feelings,” he says.
Tallott didn’t grow up around photography, but he remembers his awakening to it as an expressive medium. It all started at Village Books, Leeds’ cult bookshop. He was 15, and bought his first-ever photobook, “What Sort of Life Is This” by Albert Elm. “It changed how I viewed photography,” he says. Not long after, he took a megabus to London for a punk gig and ended up at the now-defunct Doomed gallery—a hub for countercultural art and self-publishing in Dalston. “That’s where I understood the importance of bound objects, and using photos to build a community.”
Tallott started making photocopied zines, and you can feel that DIY spirit in this book. At its center is a page filled with scans of handwritten aphorisms—the beating heart of the sequence. These are phrases his mum would say while he was in recovery: The sun will always rise in the morning; I’ll love you until the world stops going round. “Foreverisms, juxtaposed with the meaninglessness of life,” he muses. “Big promises of eternal love, but also reminders that you’ve always got tomorrow, don’t worry, it’s nothing, life’s temporary.” Tallott scrawled these lines repeatedly, as though burning them into actuality. “Calling them mantras sounds like a lot for what my mum was saying over a cup of tea, but it’s just good, honest stuff to live by.”
The artist is just one year out of his photography degree at Camberwell College of Arts, and last month, he was named Photo London’s Emerging Photographer of the Year. How does it feel to see early success with such an intimate series? “Pretty mental to be honest,” he reflects. “It’s not something you’d say to a stranger at the pub. Sometimes I wake up and it feels freeing. But other times...” It’s emotional for his loved ones, too: “It’s been difficult for my mum, especially when I’m talking about the book because it came from such a dark time. But in the end, the whole point of it is understanding life’s temporality, and learning to deal with its ebbs and flows.”
That lesson applies to all of us. Tallott describes his images as “little windows,” and they are. They’re windows that make you want to run, jump and swing into a feeling where nothing matters other than adrenaline, freedom and being alive. It’s the millisecond before the roller coaster drops; a tumble in a breaking wave; the flash of a camera in the pitch black. We see Tallott in these photographs, but we also see ourselves—our own pain, loss and search for meaning. It’s true what the Leeds fans sing from the stands: “We’ve been through it all together, and we’ve had our ups and downs. We’re gonna stay with you forever. At least until the world stops going round.”