Farewell, Promethia
Setting out on this project, I wanted to make a documentary portrait of the landscape of Great Britain. But somewhere along the way, while travelling the length and breadth of the island, it became more a subjective, poetic representation of the feelings and preoccupations of our time - of climate anxiety, of alienation from the natural world and from each other. Disillusionment, distrust, despair, decay - a sense that the paradigm we’ve been living in is coming to an end. The fear of the unknown future paradigm we must now face.
Out Of Time
An occasional series reimagining street photography in Graphics Interchange Format.
Googlology
Googlology was my first collaboration with a digital algorithm.
Google Goggles was an image recognition and object identification app, available between 2010 and 2014. It promised the ability to take a picture of something and have the algorithm identify the subject, then provide information related to it. While nowadays Google Lens (which subsumed many of Goggles’ features) and other AI-based image recognition algorithms can often achieve this effectively, at the time, Goggles success rate was less impressive.
In practice, unless the picture contained something highly identifiable such as the logo of a global brand, or a famous landmark such as the Eiffel Tower, the app would simply return twelve images from the Google index, which it deemed to be similar. Since it could only analyse the images visually, this selection seemed to be based solely on colour and form; the pictures were divorced entirely from their content or meaning in the completely democratic ‘eyes’ of Goggles. So a news image of a nuclear missile launch in Pakistan was analysed and presented next to a stock photo of a bottle of pills and a painting of a small boy wearing a blue hoodie. The resulting selection of images was wonderfully eclectic, and sometimes strangely moving in its fragmentary and multifarious glimpse of human culture.
Fascinated as I was by the ‘similar images’ when I first saw them, and particularly by those whose visual similarity was not immediately obvious, I had an urge to decipher the Goggles process as much as possible. So I decided to reverse-engineer the original image as closely as possible, as a collage from the resulting twelve ‘similar images’ that were presented when Goggles could not identify the subject of the picture.
I called the project Googlology because of its parallels with archaeology; both rely on sifting through a vast amount of material to unearth particular artefacts, which are then analysed for clues. Of course archaeology provides a picture of the past; googlology gives us only a piece of software’s perception of humanity.
After Hokusai
36 Views of Canary Wharf: images that are compositionally, thematically, tonally inspired by the great Japanese artist Hokusai’s print series 36 Views Of Mount Fuji.
In Hokusai’s series the mountain is a majestic presence in the distance, a sacred symbol of the immutable power of nature. But in most of the pictures, the majority of the frame is actually taken up by the ‘floating world’ of humanity: buildings, boats, horses, people going about their everyday business of fishing, farming, walking, labouring. This daily activity is rendered trivial, epic, and poignant, all at once, by the presence of the ancient mountain looming, silently watching over all.
London does not have such a huge, iconic natural landmark. The closest thing we have is perhaps Canary Wharf - superficially of somewhat similar shape (though the shape is constantly evolving, unlike the mountain) but a symbol of quite different qualities - modernity, wealth, change, humanity’s dominion. And depending on your political persuasion, probably either the virtue of growth or the sin of greed.
This project creates a modern day echo of 36 Views of Mount Fuji almost two centuries later and asks: What is the relationship between that very different focal point, and the floating world in the foreground?
Collateral Animals
A series of animals inadvertently killed by humanity’s restructuring of the world.
The Long Walk Back
A document of an unusual journey through England: a 500-mile walk, from my (then) residence in Brighton to the place where I was born in Durham, through all the places I had lived in-between.
It emerged from a desire to both confront my own memories and identity and explore the character of my country and its people as they are today – hoping that these two strands would overlap.
So I walked (and only walked, avoiding all vehicular transport) through a huge swathe of the country: cities and villages, fields and forests, national parks and industrial wastelands. I documented my journey in photographs and words.
Inside Out
An occasional series, manifesting tweets made nearby at the time. So occasional I only made one of them so far.
The Air Above High Hurstwood
The Air Above High Hurstwood is a meditation on the subject of personal experience in the modern world. Until very recently it was possible to live one’s life mainly concerned with one’s direct experience, and with local events that had a direct effect on that experience. Indeed for the huge majority of human history, it was impossible to live in any other way.
With the advent first of the printing press, then radio, television, the Internet and now social media such as Twitter and Facebook, most people are updated hundreds or thousands of times per day on events elsewhere on Earth, whether that be coverage of internationally significant events or a friends’ comments on their current mood.
Whilst staying in a small village in Sussex, I decided to take a series of images over the course of one day, showing the gradual change of light and weather in this tiny location, and pair these images with tweets made at exactly the same time, anywhere else in the world, by anyone, to explore the relationship - or separation - between my own experience and the near infinite sea of experience occurring elsewhere at the same time.
The project is presented as a book containing printed images, and tweets printed on to tracing paper which overlay the images.
Built Around You
This project is both a portrait of a specific place and a wider meditation on the continual modification by man of his environment.
On the edge of Redhill in Surrey, England lies an area of land of approximately 0.6 square miles, formerly the site of two sand quarries. The first of these closed in the mid-1990s and was then converted into a landfill site. The other shut down in 2005, and since then has been re-landscaped as a nature reserve and a housing development. These three very different environments are all commonplace in 21st Century Britain (which has over 1500 active landfills, 224 nationally protected nature reserves, and over 1.5 million new homes built since the millennium) but seeing them in such close proximity to one another is unusual and creates a slightly surreal landscape of strange juxtapositions, and a sometimes tense atmosphere.
The presence of the landfill in particular, easily visible on the side of a hill and often smellable from a mile away, starkly renders apparent an area of modern life often hidden from view – the continual piling up of consumer waste. The fact that this mountain of rubbish looms over a nature reserve of lake and marsh, immediately opposite a brand-new housing development, creates a discomforting vision of the contemporary environment. The juxtaposition of materials at both ends of their consumer-use lifespan is particularly thought provoking.
The fact that this area was previously fundamentally altered by man for a very different purpose - the extraction of minerals - fascinates me. Where once we mined this area for its raw materials, now we fill the resulting holes with waste, concrete for house foundations, and earth - the last in an attempt to recreate the ‘natural’ environment that was originally there.
All the interior images were taken in the show homes on the estate, and so all the decorated and furnished interiors are fabricated to give an impression of a lived-in home. I find this a telling sign of the times – that in this industry, houses are sold not via the presentation of an empty house into which the buyer can place his life, and thereby turn the house into his home, but via the presentation of an imagined generic life, calculated to seem appealing to the widest possible number of people.
Of course the whole development, being built entirely from scratch, for now at least bears something of this generic feeling – very different to communities developed more organically over the course of decades and centuries. As the global population steadily grows (the current growth rate is approx. 75 million per year) and demand for housing increases, this kind of community, providing a large number of new homes in one area very quickly, will presumably become more common.
The project is presented as a series of triptychs, reflecting the tripartite nature of the area, and suggesting a series of connections and contrasts through juxtaposition.