“What do you make of the recent news surrounding care homes?”
“There’s just not enough staff on there sometimes, it’s so easy for people to be mis-treated, not in the physical abuse kind of way but just neglected. You hear a lot about neglect, but things like that are just awful. I don’t know how people can do it, I don’t know how people can do nursing, or take on a caring role, and they’re not that type of person. In our tutorials, they say that things like that, where you see people neglecting other people or abusing them, if another human has done it then we’re all capable of it - it’s quite a scary thought."


After seeing a YouTube video recently, in which Brandon Stanton describes how he approaches strangers on the street, planted a seed into my head. Not that I think his technique is what everyone should follow, I just thought the idea of approaching someone from the front seemed logical.

So it was just my luck then that I saw Lucinda as she was walking away from me. Normally I’d run down the street, stop them or tap them on the shoulder usually as they invariably have earphones in. Instead, I crossed the road, and gently jogged to a spot where I could cross safely and waited for Lucinda to walk down to me. She was looking intently at her phone and after I had asked for her photo, she asked how to get to a store she was looking for, so we collectively found the place on our phones and worked out how to get to it from where we were stood.

For the shoot, I initially got her to stand in the middle of the road, and took a few full-length shots, just in time to get out of the way of a passing bus. I then took some head-shots as I liked her head attire, though Lucinda seemed to prefer the former.

After the shoot I got chatting and found out she’s a trainee nurse, in her first year, having worked in a hospice for a while beforehand. Even though it was a week ago now, the news of the undercover story by the BBC was fresh in my mind so I asked her what she thought of it and she gave a very interesting response. She also shared that the course was very upfront and clear in explaining the disciplinary procedures they could face, in being 'struck-off' for example.

I finished by asking Lucinda what made her go into Nursing, and she explained,

“This is going to sound weird, but I really love animals and looking after them, but I’m really allergic to them - anything with fur. I tried veterinary nursing, even worked in a couple of vet places, but I was just too allergic to them!"


Humans of Leeds