Welcome To Saturday Town
with Casey Orr
Saturday is more than a day. It stands out in the week like there's a different set of rules or maybe we write our own. There's a possibility, fun to be had, and chances for the taking. Nowhere is this more on show than in the local town high street. Outfits are paraded and new friends are made as the hours pass through us.
Casey Orr has spent 10 years capturing the unspoken meaning of Saturday in towns and cities across the UK. The project Saturday Town speaks to a familiar feeling of the possibility and excitement of being young and free on a Saturday afternoon. As the first retrospective of this work goes on show this month in Liverpool we spoke about shifting identities, the loss of the high street and Saturday as a state of mind.
Interview by Esta Maffrett | 26.04.24
How did you get into photography?
I picked up a camera when I was 15 figuring out my identity and who I was going to be. Since then i’ve been all about taking photos and I feel so lucky I’ve had the camera in my life all that time.
I’m originally from Delaware in the US and I moved here in my early 20s. The culture is so different and the fashion is so different, I’ve lived in the North and I’m obsessed with the the Northern cities and the way Northern people spend their Saturdays. Where I came from it’s very suburban and moving here I became very aware that Saturdays meant a lot to people here. That this is a working class part of the world and these cities and towns have a history of factory work so people on Saturdays get dressed up and go out. It’s time spent away from your job or for a young person it’s time away from school and the family where you go out into public spaces. It’s a sense of freedom. I became really interested in how people were wearing that as fashion.
Has it always been portrait photography for you?
I consider myself a documentary photographer and a portrait photographer. When I’m trying to figure out something about the world, when I’m wondering about something, I think about a series of portraits and how to explore a subject through portraits of people. I love working with people.
Your project Saturday Girl began from a fascination with big hair and the way you saw it as a form of communication. Can you expand on how hair operates as a form of communication and what it’s saying?
So when I was in Leeds over 10 years ago I was seeing young women wearing beehives, wigs and big hair, hairdos like it was the 1960s. It felt like an earlier time in history and I wondered if it had been handed down through history but updated to mean something different and I saw that as a way of communicating. Also, If it’s a language it has a dialect so the language that someone is speaking in Leeds is different to someone in London or any other city. It’s a visual language and a language of the body but it still has a dialect depending on where you are. I saw the language of Liverpool as very friendly and open which related to their being a port city and the history of strangers coming and going. Somewhere like Burnley that is landlocked has a wildness to it. The way that people are is related to the landscape. So I became fascinated with these highly sophisticated languages people were presenting themselves through. We’re all trying to find our crowd and we can do that through unspoken language. Especially in Britain, fashion has always been at the forefront of how people express themselves.
Definitely agree with how you’ve thought about the dialects of different towns, we’ve found through publicly submitted photos that a Punk in Birmingham will look completely different to a Punk in Hull due to the way fashion moves through the country. I also believe that often these languages you’ve described have been undervalued or taken for granted because they’re done by women and are seen as vanity rather than intentional ways of presenting ourselves.
Makeup can be the most incredible illustration. You’re right, these everyday creations that, because women are doing them, are not seen as valuable. It’s an amazing creative outlet.
For this project I began this project. I went to 16 cities and towns all over the UK and photographed until 2019 when I felt like I had done it. But the thing is people are always changing. Something that happened during the time I was shooting was that the binaries of gender started to fall apart. When I started the project in 2013 it was Saturday Girl and the idea was photographing young women. Girl was a very different word than it is now, very straightforward, now it’s called Saturday Town because it’s about everyone. There was a time when I had to re-evaluate what it meant and who it included. All kinds of people were coming into my studio with all different identities and the binary of the work fell apart which was an incredible revolution. I was honoured to work with so many people and hear what they had to say about what was going on.
When the pandemic hit I was working on a book and had to think about what I was going to do next. So many of the places I passed through while photographing the shops and town centres, they’re all shut down. All those places gone. High streets in Northern towns have been decimated and these are the places that you have your right of passage when you’re young and you’re learning to be visible in the world. So that’s when it became Saturday Town. I travelled through the Northern towns again and saw so much creativity and wildness around, my theory is that while young people were stuck in their rooms they found communities on Tiktok and Instagram. They didn’t have to deal with the people on the high street who might not be accepting and could express themselves as they wanted. I set up in empty shops and photographed people. There was so much energy and creativity. It was so important to me because I got to do my job and my job was to see these people.
It’s amazing how your work has captured this really big shift in young people's ideas about the world and identity and who they can be. What were some lessons you took from seeing all these people about the performance of identity?
It’s permeated my life for so long, I was a very different person when I began, I was a different age and my daughter was 12 so I went through this journey with her. My daughter was becoming visible as I was becoming invisible. So it has really become a journey for me learning to express myself. Since the lockdown time I thought ‘fuck it when I go out there I’m gonna wear whatever I want’! I learnt to be brave and step out of myself. Because these young people are so brave, since the pandemic the danger and aggressiveness towards young trans and non binary kids has accelerated so much. So for me, I want to make these photographs to see these young people, witness them and photograph them so they can see each other and form communities and feel belonging. I have also photographed people and had conversations with them about how difficult it is to see themselves in my photos because a picture today is not who that person wants to be next year. It’s complicated and difficult and always changing.
I think what you’re saying is so important as a photographer but also for all of us to know the importance of really seeing people and the power to affirm them through that. Also, acknowledging that identity is difficult and shifting and allowing space to speak on that. What was your relationship with Saturdays growing up?
Saturday for me would be going to the mall and hanging out with friends. In America it’s different, there’s a lot of car culture but that gives the sense of freedom. Saturday might not be the same for everybody, some people have jobs, but there’s something to do with autonomy and exploring. Exploring yourself, your community and people you haven’t met yet.
We need Saturday Town. We need fun and uncertainty, play and creativity, all the learning and recreation that young people get to experience on a Saturday.
Yes, there’s definitely something in the potential of a Saturday. Can you talk a bit more about the shift you went on from Saturday Girl to Saturday Town and why this reframing was important?
Before the pandemic I would use rolls of colourful paper and after I decided to do whatever I want and experiment with fabric. I mean, it seems a bit ridiculous, deciding to mix a little velvet with some shiny stuff but it was this freedom that the fabric represented when you could see folds and movement in it. It related to how the project made me think about identity and culture and all these shifts and changes happening. And then I had to lose that word ‘girl’ because I wanted everyone to feel welcome in this project, it was about everybody feeling welcome in Saturday Town and what that meant. We need Saturday Town. We need fun and uncertainty, play and creativity, all the learning and recreation that young people get to experience on a Saturday.
My way of working has also evolved. I don’t just set up in a town but I do talks with local colleges and workshops with youth groups that can create professional practice and opportunities. There’s an art school vibe with what I’m planning to do next where I’m going to be working in locations over a long period of time. One of those is Burnley, I’ll be in a space for a year and I want to collaborate with young people and young designers. I really want to turn all of the old Topshops into Saturday Towns where everyday is Saturday, they could become youth clubs and art schools where everything is free. I work with a designer who does all the incredible and fun graphics for our workshops. We’re building something that’s more than just me and the person being photographed.
It’s so important that young people have space to just be. Creativity may evolve overtime but having somewhere to just turn up and see other people being creative helps you to understand yourself so much better. Could you tell us a bit more about your current exhibition Saturday Town in Liverpool?
The exhibition in Liverpool is the first retrospective of all the work. It was looking at 1200 portraits with a curator and trying to pull out the themes in the work which was really interesting. One of the major themes was matching best friends which I love so much because it’s about finding your person and wanting to share their vibe so you wear the same clothes. Witches is a big theme that’s coming through everywhere and Animals is a big one as well. There are so many different ways of having a queer identity and it keeps on growing and I love that so much. So there’s 90 pictures in this show that are trying to bring forth these themes then there’s also interviews about identity and a new publication.
Photography wants to pin things down and say this is what something is, meanwhile the subjects of these photos are denying that, I love that I’m working with this medium that holds this tension.
If you could put one object into the Museum of Youth Culture what would it be and why?
In the past couple of years I’ve seen all kinds of witchy and spiritual objects. A lot of handmade things like animal bones on necklaces. So maybe a chicken foot necklace. I think it would say so much about what this time has meant to people. The crossover of paganism with punk, the mixing of tribes, and the overlapping of subcultures. What are you? You’re all of it.
Saturday Town is on show at Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool.
11 April - 18 May
Free Entry
