Looking at the overlooked

It should be obvious by now that I have not had any kind of career in photography. Mostly, my photography has happened while I was doing other things; family, work, travelling. I have gone to places, met people and taken photographs rather than gone to places and meet people to take photographs.

This may partly explain why I am drawn to photographers and images whose subject is the incidental, the everyday and the ordinary rather than the exceptional, the spectacular or the picturesque. This is not to say that photographs of the ordinary need themselves be ordinary. Think of Saul Leiter almost all of whose non-commercial photography was of who and what he saw within two blocks of his New York home. It is too easy to confuse the urgent, the strange and the extraordinary with the important or the beautiful.

There is a strong thread of the quotidian running through British documentary photography too, from Emil Otto Hoppé’s London, through John Claridge, John Bulmer, John Myers and my own favourites, David Hurn, Tony Ray Jones, Nick Hedges and Tish Murtha. 

John Myers referred to his own photographs of the houses, garages, shops, electricity substations and bus stops within walking distance of where he lived in Stourbridge, West Midlands, as ‘landscapes without incident’; images of the routine; the same place, different day experience through which most of us pass, most of the time. For Myers in particular, ‘looking at the overlooked’ is important in helping us ‘come to terms’ with the world as it is for most of us, most of the time.

Myers’ work operates at the fuzzy and overlapping boundaries of landscape and documentary photography which is where I like to be too. Afon Lwyd is as good an expression of this as I have achieved so far. In this new project, I want to move away from landscape as geography and documentary in ‘real time’ to a focus on landscape as architecture and to historical time. Specifically, I want to explore how the changing economic and social functions of work have been concretised in the architecture of the industrial estate.

That may sound like a variation on the ‘roundabouts of Milton Keynes’ theme but a great deal of sociological scholarship has been invested in deconstructing and decoding the organisation of labour through the bricks and mortar of the prison, the factory, the hospital and the school (or university). Crudely put, the argument is that the built environment both controls the activity of workers/ inmates/ patients etc. and signals to the outside world the nature and the meaning of the activities that go on behind the walls. While I can make some claims to understanding the sociology, I know nothing (yet) about architectural photography.

The workplace is a common enough theme in documentary photography, although quite often the focus is on the activity or the person more than on the building. Not surprisingly perhaps, there has been little photographic interest in the industrial estate. Indeed, there would appear to have been very little interest in the industrial estate at all, by anyone. And yet they have been in existence since 1896 when the former deer park of the De Trafford family was sold to become Manchester’s Trafford Park.

The only cultural reference to industrial estates that I can find is in The Fall’s 1978 cheery song, ‘Yeah, Yeah Industrial Estate’,

Yeah, yeah, industrial estate
And the crap in the air will fuck up your face
Yeah, yeah, industrial estate
Boss can bloody take most of your wage
And if you get a bit of depression
Ask the doctor for some Valium

And yet most towns seem to have an industrial/ trade/ business park on their doorstep.

I became familiar with them from training in the days when I used to race bikes. After hours, they provide well lit, traffic free, well maintained roads to bomb around on undisturbed. Lately, and at a much slower pace, I have become aware of how industrial estates bear witness to how work is constructed both architecturally and sociologically and how that has changed over time. It is this that will be the key theme of the project – what does the architecture of industrial estates tell us about the contemporary nature of work/ employment and the social organisation of labour?

Pace as well as place is going to be important too, as it was in the Afon Lwyd project. Both Leiter and Myers made their images at walking pace and I want to make this a ‘slow photography’ project. Slow photography is an aspect of ‘slow movements’ in journalism, cities, food etc. A slow approach will suit this project as the kinds of change in which I am interested happens generationally rather than instantly. To reflect this, I am also going to adopt an analogue style. I am not going to abandon my DSLR but I will limit the number of pictures I take in any one day to 24/ 36; I will stick to prime lenses if I can; I will try to get it right in camera rather than in post-production and I will print from negatives using traditional, wet methods and it here that I will look to experiment most. I intend the outcome of the project to be a small number of gallery prints.

I think it only fair that I should look next at the work of John Myers, from whose work I have stolen the title for this project.