'Concept'

I am currently working on an exhibition, Locus, which will take place in February. A lot of finer details are still being ironed out, but here is a working 'concept' for my contribution to the show:

"For the past five months I have been photographing Anglia Square, a shopping centre in Norwich due to be demolished and replaced by a new shopping precinct. Through the premise of documenting its current state the themes and boundaries of what my work really concerns have emerged. I am interested in the evocation of place using referential forms; photography and (through collaboration with Mike Saunders) field recordings, as opposed to representational forms such as painting.

Photography’s mimetic qualities are representative of a constrained perspective. To this end, there is a narrator present in most photographic images. My work aims to evoke a sense of place which exists independently of the artist, in the unoccupied perspective where the artist-narrator’s presence is covert. His hand is only noticeable by its absence; he is a ghost who releases the shutter.

The strategy I have devised in order to achieve this, firstly imposes physical boundaries which define the area I am working in, stipulating that (within reason) all equipment used has to have been purchased within the limits of Anglia Square. To this end I have been using equipment which provides little artistic control, such as fixed exposure cameras from charity shops. To further the loss of control I have made a conscious effort to shoot objectively and unemotively, avoiding the inclusion of people, before rewinding the exposed film to the beginning of the roll and exposing it again so that any unconscious aspect of the natural gaze is removed.

What we are left with then is perhaps less a fragment of what we see and more a reflection of how we think and remember; a non-unilinear evocation, a trace of something which has existed, presented in a way closer to how we remember it than traditional documentary photography."

The work will be presented with Mike Saunders' field recordings/sound maps, which ever label you deem appropriate, and a selection of work by Sarojini Lewis.

I will document further developments here, including experiments with 35mm slide projections which will also feature in the exhibition.

Magdalen Street Celebration Exhibition

I had not initially intended to frame my work; I have discussed at length the panoramic border, which is in itself a frame. However, I was not allocated a space until I dropped my work off a week before it was shown and as such thought it would be safe to frame the work. Like much of the progress in this project I was pleasantly surprised with something I felt was out of my control; the black frame I used compliments the images’ borders without being too heavy handed in its reflection of them.

When I dropped my work off I was able to choose a space; a rectangular annex room, about 10ft x 3ft with a window at one end, roughly A4 size. The room is in a semi-derelict state. It has gallery-ness (it has been painted white and has a framed piece of work in it) but it retains the feeling of a post-functional space. It is neither a gallery space, nor a room and this state of flux becomes a metaphor for Anglia Square itself.

One reason I was apprehensive about using a frame is that I often feel frames are with the work and not part of it, but here the frame not only complements the photographs’ borders but the glass also acts as a catalyst for the potential reading of the images as reflections. The window, which is opposite the frame, both literally and figuratively reflects the overlapped images; the outcome is one of duplicity and layers.

Another layer, or indeed series of layers, is present in the sound-map created by Mike Saunders which is playing simultaneously through speakers and headphones. This has the desired affect in-situ which I had hoped for: blurring the distinction between naturally occurring noises from the outside world with the carefully mapped audio arrangement. The presence of the sound-map and the window provide the reader with options as to how they choose to read the work; whether or not to wear the headphones, whether or not to look through the window and if so, from which side?

The fact that the images are printed on standard 6x4 paper and that they are mounted using photo corners gives them an ephemeral quality which acts as a doorway to the theme of memory but not to a specific or personal memory. Both the images and the audio play with each other, are fragments of context arranged in a para-surrealist manner to optimise the space for subjective readings for the viewer. The layers of sound and image become the strands in the diagram I previously referenced by John Berger representing the non-unilinear process of memory.

Further Experiments with Multiple Exposures

After my initial experiments with multiple exposures I took my Wide Pic Panoramic camera on holiday with me; this was when I realised that the Wide Pic Panoramic is not really designed for rewinding a frame at a time. I lost half a roll of film attempting to create some double exposures when the teeth stopped winding the film on. It seems I was lucky when I created my initial multiple exposures at Anglia Square and would have to re-think my work process. These new images were created by exposing the whole roll of film, rewinding it completely and then exposing it a second time.

I have said before that the equipment I am using takes a lot of control away from the artist; fixed shutter speed and aperture, a machine in the chemist prints my images automatically. Exposing the entire film twice in this manner also means I have no control over which images are overlapped, or even if the frames lie cleanly over the top of one another, indeed some of the images have two overlaps. The resulting images could perhaps be described as para-surrealist; the loss of control providing free associations between frames. And while perhaps not ‘semi-conscious’ image making, I tried as much as possible to free myself of as much responsibility as possible. To this end my only concerns were finding compositions with strong horizontal lines to complement the ‘panoramic’ view, providing a vague uniformity in the images so that where they overlap they would hopefully complement one another, and also to try not to take the same photo twice.

Some of these images are more successful than others – echoes in shapes and overlapping text for example are very pleasing – but I still feel the images are a series, regardless of whether or not one is stronger than the other. I have been given the opportunity to exhibit some of my work in an empty shop unit in Anglia Square as part of the Magdalen Street Celebration and would like to exhibit a series of images. There is an unconscious relationship between the overlapped exposures in the individual images, the next stage is to find a way in which to arrange these chance pairings as a collective group.

Sean Edwards, No Dust Adheres

Stills from No Dust Adheres, Sean Edwards (2010)

In February I went to see No Dust Adheres, a film by Sean Edwards which explores social histories around urban commercial space and architecture through a melee of tracking shots of a soon-to-be demolished shopping centre near his home. Looking at my panoramic images after revisiting Sean Edwards' work has affected the way I view them. The cinematic framing I previously mentioned has become far more pronounced and I find a real sense of movement comes about from the overlapping frames and the merging of images. Through this merging of images a panoramic landscape is created and we are forced to read the work in a set order, to move through the frames as one continuous image, much like Edwards' film which moves along a set horizontal line. However, by using still images the pace of movement and reading is set by the viewer, not the artist.

The overlapping in Edwards' work is the result of shop window reflections; showing my images to a friend recently she thought my multiple exposures were reflections. I am happy for that reading/implication to lay latent in the images. My reasons for using multiple exposures, as I previously mentioned, were to represent a non-unilinear thought process but the implication of reading them as reflections is relevant too.

The press release for No Dust Adheres describes 'the camera's lingering shots of the building's interior alluding to film genres such as science fiction or the haunted house.' Indeed there is a hypnotic effect to the work; I remember watching the film sat on a cold floor in Outpost gallery alone wondering if the natural sounds of traffic and life outside were part of the film. I am still unsure whether or not the film has any audio.

I have recently been talking to a friend of mine about creating a 'sound map' of Anglia Square to accompany a forthcoming exhibition of these images. In writing about his love of Noise music, Mike Saunders says: 'I am constantly interested in it in a way that is either completely visceral or indescribable... it is so ready, so malleable for questioning.' Mike recently conducted a walk from Norwich to Cambridge. Reading through his notes regarding the affect Noise music had on him during this expedition (which can be read in full here) it seems his journey is more of an experiment than a hike. During one section of his walk across the Fens Mike describes 'the surreal remove that this music inhabits the landscape.' What I hope to achieve by making use of sound recordings in the exhibition is the blurring of natural and recorded noises, to recreate the unknowing I felt when watching No Dust Adheres.

Wide Pic Panoramic Camera

Today I collected the first batch of prints made with my Wide Pic Panoramic Camera. The first and most striking thing about these images is their letterbox 'panoramic' border. The thick, black wedge divides the image (the borders are part of the image not external to it) clearly into thirds and makes horizontal lines of composition immediately more potent and arresting. The border here must be considered a part of the image as it qualifies the composition. This is more or less subtle depending on the strength and darkness of the lines in the middle section of the image.

The border invites a particular way of seeing and a uniformity within the images. Sifting through the prints it feels as though each image is part of a jigsaw puzzle where all the pieces tessellate and can be arranged to create a new landscape.

Another effect of the 'Panoramic' view is its cinematic framing. To arrange them in this jigsaw manner where there is no right or wrong progression creates movement in and between images as they are placed in succession. I wish to expand upon this process later by mapping a journey through Anglia Square.

This roll of film also marks my first tentative experimentations with multiple exposures. Due to the simplicity of the equipment I have been using, coupled with the fact I am not well acquainted with it, the effects created by these multiple exposures were barely in my control; I wound the film back what I believed to be roughly a frame and took the next image.

Fellow NUCA graduate Jo Surzyn uses multiple exposures in her work to create a landscape which 'is an abstraction, suggestion, representation and even perhaps provocation... [which] represents a single location but points towards a larger context.' Where information is lost or blurred the reader is asked to make their own interpretation. It is like seeing the sketch from which a painting is made. Here the image's subjective margin is opened up and the reader is required to project their experience into this space. John Berger explains that;

Overlapping images and grouping them as above provides a wider context for the overall image and better represents the way our memories are formed and recalled. The multiple exposure images simultaneously provide a greater context while remaining vague , insofar as giving a sense of place as opposed to a definite trace. I intend to expand upon these experiments in multiple exposures and mapping/merging images in the coming weeks.

PACT Animal Sanctuary

The experience of browsing in a charity shop, of this charity shop in particular, is a curious one. It is an attic for the community where unused picture frames, video cassettes, exercise bikes, cameras and old clothes are stuffed away. The shop unit is arranged like a sitting room with sofas facing the centre, china dolls on sideboards, picture frames on the walls; it is a shop disguised as a house.

It is furnished with weightless mementoes. By this I mean there is a sense of nostalgia and time-passed but the reader is aware these items have been discarded; the nostalgic reading is undermined and there is no weight of history in the objects.
In arguing the case that photography should be considered as separate from fine-art, John Berger explains that ‘The good photograph is the well-composed one. Yet this is only true in so far as we think of photographic images imitating painted ones.’ While painting’s strength lies in the arrangement of objects within a frame, photography relies on what is excluded from the frame.



The objects in these images have been arranged to create a pleasing composition by the shop staff. This composition is perhaps more so dictated by practicality than aesthetics, but the latter is clearly also a consideration. In photographing these ready made pseudo-domestic compositions what is excluded from the image is, ironically, any genuine sense of an ephemeral history. This creates friction between the objects as they are somewhat forcefully arranged.

People and Places

Using old film and cheap cameras imbues the images with a certain sense of nostalgia; as the digital image has become omniscient, the reading of images which are consciously presented as analogue images changes. That is to say when we are aware that we are looking at images made through dated processes this alters the perceived meaning of those images.

It is important that this effect is created through analogue processes rather than digital manipulation; the flat tones in these images, the dust and scratches are akin to the crackle and hiss of a vinyl record which can be reproduced artificially but is never quite the same.

As I previously mentioned, the lack of sophistication in the equipment I am using creates a loss of control over almost everything beyond the composition of the images; I do not even have complete control over this as there is a parallax view in a lot of cheap and disposable cameras. As my degree of control over the images is lost, the Square itself takes some authority over the images; the psychogeography of the place determines the ways in which I walk through it, how I see it. The effect of this is that the role of the photographer becomes minimal in order to maximise subjective narrative space for the reader.

I had initially intended to photograph people as part of the series. This began with experiments sat in Café Rendezvous with a disposable camera rested on a coke can. Having considered my approach I decided it would be best to try and steal images, to catch the unconscious gesture in order for the subject to surrender something of their soul to the image. This of course is something which a photographer may take years to achieve and is largely reliant on chance.


Looking through my first batch of prints the images predominantly of people felt in opposition to those which were predominantly of place; of course I anticipated that they would be different but not to the degree that they opposed one another. It is a question of time. If we are concerned with photographing people there is an inherent temporality; this is a fraction of a second in a lifetime. While spaces have their own lifespan, they age differently and so the same fraction of a second may be reproduced at a later stage. This is an impossibility when photographing a person. To this end the images of Anglia Square and the people who occupy it do not belong together as they command different lines of thought in their reading. I am happy for people to have a presence in my images, but not for their dominance; I will no longer be photographing people in Anglia Square.

Anglia Square

Since plans were announced to demolish Anglia Square and build a new shopping mall in its place, the shopping centre has become a more frequent subject for photographers. I walk past the back Anglia Square every day and at least twice in any given week I see the site being preserved by photographers.

In undertaking this documentary project I decided to only use cameras I have bought from businesses in Anglia Square. Practically, this means I have been using disposable and compact cameras bought in second hand shops (Vivitar 35mm Slim Camera, various generic brand disposable cameras and a Halina MW35e which refuses to relinquish the film I have exposed in it).

This constraint, if it is a constraint, removes some technical burdens and to this end the control I have over the images’ formal aspects centre on composition.


A clean, simple objectivity; taken from a middle distance with a clear focal point dominating the centre of the frame. In framing my images in this way I was very conscious of mimicking Eugéne Atget. On some level this comparison could be seen as a parody when considering the scale of Atget’s efforts to document an entire city but this is not the intention of my work.

Eugene Atget

Rue du Maure c. 1908

Like Atget I intend to compile an apolitical catalogue of images to document exactly how a place stood. The Square is seen by many as an eyesore; a failed development of the 1960s, which was planned in three phases of development but left as it is seen now with only the first phase completed. From what I understand there was a lack of funding due to an economic relapse as we are experiencing now; one can only wonder how much of the new development will be completed before funds run out again. This context is political enough in itself and to strive to find a viewpoint that might bring this out in the composition would be too heavy handed; for better or worse Anglia Square in its current condition is part of the fabric of Norwich.

A more impulsive set of images do not strictly follow this objective Atget style and although these images were found inadvertently and commanded my camera, perhaps on a subconscious level they were informed by Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler’s film Manhatta. The film is composed of industrial and urban scenes of geometric precision, making heavy use of shadows. Strand described the process as the ‘abstract organisation of reality.’

Paul Strand & Charles Sheeler
Manhatta (1921)

To be free from one way of seeing is important to me as our perception and reading of a place is easily changeable. I want the images to be read as a series; there is a degree of uniformity endowed by the cameras - the quality of the lens and film - and as such it is possible for these images to have a slightly differing compositional style and still belong together.