“Ramona and Elvira are like twins with very different characters, two parts of one person… Ramona thinks Elvira’s crazy and Elvira thinks Ramona’s crazy. I say both of them are crazy. You cannot be two people, you have to be one.”

This is the tale of one woman’s two lives. Her family in Romania call her Elvira but in England she is known by the name on her passport, Ramona. It is a collaboration, with words by Ramona/Elvira, and straddles documentary photography, socially engaged practice and ethnography.

Elvira and Me was conceived as a book project and it is through this form that I believe our collaboration comes across best. The book can be viewed here and you can hear Ramona’s voice in a photofilm, below. Hard copies were printed by Big Issue North Trust.

Some of the images were exhibited in Turn Sideways in the Wind, an exhibition of my Greater Manchester Roma work, held at Salford Art Gallery in 2015. This work was supported by funding from Arts Council England and the Lipman Miliband Trust.