“The house was full of memories that were taken away, like my mother who now doesn’t know who I am or know who she is.”

Since 1987 Matthew Finn has been collaborating with his mother in a series of portraits that depict her everyday rituals set within her home in Leeds.

Over the 30 years he has documented Jean’s ordinary moments showing his mother as a woman going about her daily life from doing the washing up to having a cigarette, making a cup of tea and changing the wall paper from time-to-time.

The images have now been published in his first book, Mother, which he will be discussing at Waterstones in Watford High Street at the end of the month.

It follows his mother from middle age to becoming an elderly woman with mixed dementia. Matthew used the family home as a backdrop. A place where he grew up with his mother and her elder brother, neither ever married so the pair lived together for 76 years.

Matthew, now 46, began taking photos at the age of 16 after his father died and he discovered he had many half brothers and sisters as his father had been married several times.

Despite moving to Watford in 1995, after completing a Masters in photography at Westminster Univeristy, Matthew continued to return home and chronicling her life regularly.

Matthew’s uncle died in 2014 and until then he admits: “I didn’t realise how much he’d done for my mother.

“In 2015 she fell and went into delirium and never came out of it. She probably had it [dementia] for several years, I just didn’t know the signs.”

After all those years photographing her and the family home, his mother moved into residential care and Matthew chose not to continue the series from there finish the series at the house.

“The book charts this demise of having to move out of the family home and move my mother into residential care.

“The final images in the book are the breakdown of the home and moving furniture out, a wall where frames once were that left marks or a bedstead and nothing else.

“In the end it’s a slow process. The house becomes a metaphor for her mental health - the house was full of memories that were taken away, like my mother who now doesn’t know who I am or know who she is.”

Matthew will host a talk at Waterstones on Thursday, September 28 between 6pm and 8pm, accompanied by Alzheimer’s Society and Dementia Friends.

“I don’t want it to be too dark,” he tells me. “I would like it to be educational. I was really surprised how ignorant I was about dementia, on many things like the difference between dementia and Alzheimer’s.”

I wondered if his work, and collating it into a book, had been therapeutic in anyway. Matthew explained how photography had always been a buffer between him and his mother.

“I never spoke to my mother about things like relationships, things stayed as the status quo and there was a routine. I would go back and take photographs and then go home. There wasn’t a period when I didn’t go back.

“It allowed us not to speak about things good or bad and so it helped me cope but also helped us not to talk about it.”

Find out more about Matthew at mattfinn.com