Failing Orbit 1 - Neighbourhood

Legends, 2010

On leaving my house I travel in a circular fashion, walking along the peripheral routes that orbit my own neighbourhood. Navigating certain urban, manufacturing, retail and domestic centers, I have been using photography to map the psychological spaces of my immediate locale.

If the traditional notion of ‘neighborhood’ connotes familiarity and belonging, here the neighborhood becomes estranged by the cartographical act of photography itself. The act of photography distances one from the place depicted. The photographer always alien to the location of the photograph; intruder, outsider. The way people behave towards you is testimony to this. Thus, it is not my locale that I photograph, but that of another. It is an alien world I build when I make images, no mere document of a place, but a fantasy of place. A desire to belong to a space that cannot be occupied.

The local is a psychological construct that one never quite ‘fits’ within; there is always gap between familiarity and belonging. Spaces may look the same on a day-to-day basis, they may seem recognizable, usual, unremarkable, but on closer inspection they become uncannily strange - ungraspable and impenetrable. Hence the circular orbit. To maintain a distance. 

Introduction

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.