Nobody's Home

Nobody’s Home by John Maher is a touring exhibition produced by Street Level Photoworks and part of an on-going partnership with Dunoon Burgh Hall.

In Nobody’s Home photographer John Maher captures abandoned houses across Lewis and Harris, and the exhibition is augmented with other imagery shot against a stunning Hebridean backdrop. This series of images brings the Outer Hebrides to the historic Dunoon Burgh Hall and is part of an ongoing partnership between DBH and Street Level Photoworks.

At 16 years of age John was recruited as a member of the punk band Buzzcocks, and several chart hits followed before the band broke up in 1981. In 2002, he relocated from his hometown of Manchester to the Isle of Harris, where he lives and works today.

He initially made his photographs in the dead of night, under the light of a full moon. Many of his night photographs involve lighting the interiors of old buildings, vehicles and boats scattered around the Hebridean landscape. In several instances, he would return during daylight hours to shoot the interiors of abandoned croft houses he’d visited the night before. This was the beginning of a new way of photographing the islands, which ultimately led to the Nobody’s Home project, with the resulting photographs of decaying man-made objects set against a backdrop of stunning Hebridean landscapes appearing in a wide variety of publications.

As a direct result of seeing John’s images of abandoned croft houses, the Western Isles’ housing body, Tighean Innse Gall, in conjunction with the Carnegie Trust, has set a plan to renovate some of the derelict properties.