A further walk in the Park

I made my fourth visit to Trafford Park on 19^th August, in sunshine. I planned to walk through those areas to the north and west of the Park that I had only partly explored previously. 

Pretty Ugly

I was still looking for a kind of ironic Martin Parr effect where saturated colours point not to all the fun of a seaside holiday but to the discontinuity between the mundane reality of the object and its vibrance. I found a number of objects that were both pretty (and) ugly in this way:

The buildings and other structures were little different in this part of the Park from those I had found on earlier explorations and I thought that I might simply be repeating myself with shots of mysterious/ unintelligible/ ugly workplaces but the sunlight did change the aesthetic in a way that reinforced the colour/ object discontinuities. The blue sky and fluffy white clouds point to a similar contradiction of expectations:

In the strong light, every discarded fag packet, rivet and rust stain produced a kind of hyper-real, almost composited, effect that forces attention on the ‘infra-ordinary’ and its challenge to the usual order of significance.

Even in more overcast conditions, later in the day, the light helped to accentuate the sheer materiality of the buildings: 

Note that this building was designed to look like this. It hasn’t developed organically as its use changed over time. This is precisely designed and engineered ugliness. 

The efficiencies that can be achieved through such utilitarian architecture are well illustrated below, in contrast to the faded elegance of the once grand flour mill against which this cabin was positioned:

During the day, I found new examples of the puzzling lengths gone to to make buildings secure and some further examples of ‘wildness’ but these images will make more sense as and when these themes are developed in the final form of the project and so I have not included examples here.

The dominant theme to emerge on this walk, again on a Sunday and at the furthest point from Old Trafford and the Quays, was the absence of people. 

Missing Persons

There is such a compositional weight to the human form, especially the face, that I excluded people from my project at the outset. People in an image can reduce everything else to mere ‘background’ and in this project, the ‘background’ is the subject. I wanted to show what is difficult to see or too often overlooked and people in an image almost always, and too easily, draw the eye. There is a tendency too, in some documentary approaches, to include people in order to idealise or romanticise them or to use them symbolically such that a specific miner becomes a symbol for dispossessed and exploited miners everywhere; the foundry worker represents a lament for the nobility of honest labour or that the redundant car worker is taken as a token of the carelessness of globalisation and the abandonment of community.

In the same way that so many buildings prevent looking in and looking out and in the ironic sense that Marx implied when using the term ‘open for business’ (Book 6 of Das Kapital), I wanted the people who work and who once lived on the Park to remain hidden from sight; implied rather than stated and for the viewer’s imagination to be unconstrained by particular likenesses or biographical detail so that a common rather than a particular identity emerges.

Hence, I looked for opportunities for the workers on the Park to be recorded in their absence:

These images do not show who was sitting reading the paper on the broken chair; what relationships connect those three mugs or what has happened to the person who used to pick up the post from the demolished factory’s front gate. There is no way of knowing who delivered the last order from the closed cafe; or who marked the faded goal posts on the blocked up wall of a lorry depot; or what motivated someone to make art out of the railings by a bus stop. The invisibility of the homeless person is perhaps no greater than it normally is. 

These ‘missing persons’ are just a fraction of those whose working lives in the Park will pass by undifferentiated, unnoticed, leaving hardly a trace – just as those of the tens of thousands who preceded them already have.

Cornered

This final image contains many of the ideas that occupied me on this particular walk through the Park:

Broken, useless railings, sticking up from a grubby street, protecting a faceless, brutalist work shed with the least possible hint of colour or decoration that only serves to emphasise the monotone; people traced only by their detritus and razor wire keeping the viewer out and the sky beyond reach. It speaks to an anonymous, in-humane, captive experience of work that no amount of colour or blue sky can brighten.