Match Day

Match Day is a body of work consisting of constructed narratives of ritual behaviour set against a backdrop of football grounds across the country. Tabitha Jussa began photographing and capturing events in the late 00’s, and her photographs encompass the beginning of the KEIOC campaign to keep Everton within the city and the Spirit of Shankly’s fan activism, which did much to make the current owners of Liverpool FC promise to make ticket prices affordable to local fans.   Although Jussa started out as a documentary photographer her interest in fusing together traditional and contemporary approaches to photography has brought about her own distinctive style. An observer’s distance has been adopted, taking in the scene as a whole, resulting in all-encompassing large-scale landscapes. These new realities are presented as large-scale photographs that begin to reveal the minutiae of ritual within crowd behaviour alongside newly formed narratives and relationships between people and place. Jussa is interested in the emotionally intense, optimistic uncertainty shared by thousands of individuals and the way this shapes itself physically.