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The Double, 2010 |
This blog charts the development of my new photographic work. The image above is from the project Scratching at Solid Surfaces (working title), a psycho-geographic documentary of failing and irregular orbits. Navigating the 'Terrain Vague' near my home in Splott, Cardiff, I have been photographing an economic landscape, familiar across Britain today. Spaces caught between prosperity and abject failure, these photographs depict a locale that has been crushed by the global. The spaces of the everyday are now powerful signifiers of an international crisis of epic proportions.
Using a large format camera to document journeys around my neighborhood, I attempt to avoid urban centers, instead circumnavigating peripheries and zones given over to housing estates, retail and leisure parks. The static immobile gaze of the 5x4" camera, not only turns its subjects into monuments, but, as when you stare at anything for too long, the space takes on an uncanny quality of otherness - a space removed from the familiar and everyday. These are documents of an anxious and melancholic time.