Empty Days

… a sustained enquiry and search for understanding and meaning in a sometimes-bleak interior landscape … the great success of 'Empty Days' is in drawing the viewer fully into Paddy’s world… and as in life, it is both rewarding and on occasions disturbing. – John Goto in Photomonitor, March 2018 In run-down streets and shabby cafés Paddy Summerfield found his pictures for Empty Days. Among the tragic lives he encountered, lives that touched him because they reflected his own struggles, he made images that would tell their stories, his own story.“This is the world I know, it could be anywhere, a place we have all seen before. I am sad, the world is sad. I don't know if I take photographs to embrace sadness or or push it away.”For Empty Days Summerfield has found emblems of the great themes: religion, sex, and death. Yet among the bleakness of various addictions, the ravages of drinking, of pills, he shows no spiritual comfort, no sexual joy, only the search for love in an unloving world,