Non-place and uncertain spaces

Psychogeography is a good companion to the random thinking flaneur who wanders with a camera. I've always been drawn to marginal places and spaces. Photography is an absolute passion and the timing of the shutter firing fits my own attention span on the world. The urban experience is different to me everyday. Saying that, I do have interests that are central to the city and its edges. What sometimes seems like aimless wandering is justified by this random mapping - finding material subjects that fit the projects I concentrate on, such as ruin, wasteground, non-places, textures, walls, palimpsests, odd wording, letters, objects on the ground, the list goes on. Robert Frank once said 'you can photograph anything these days'. Its true, and most people are photographers as well. But its how you collate, edit' and present work that helps a working photographer to find an interested audience.

Beyond the spaces of ruin and wastelands that often lay forgotten are the evergrowing number of new buildings, the shining glass exteriors of offices and group companies that are like mini-mirrors of beast capitals like Bejing and Tokyo, New York and London. At the city fringes, along side the dead garages and waste grounds are the non-place (a name coined by French philosopher and anthropologist Marc Auge). These new filled spaces are transitory states through which we move through - often very slowly and mechanically, for transactional and security purposes: airports, retail parks, ATM queues, the new 'malls' and peripheral supermarkets. There are dozens of other examples of non-places. A recent photograph I took shows a sample of a new 'exclusive home zone'(see Lytham below). Near to this was a 'Marketing Suite' where flags waved proudly on clipped lawns and not a soul in sight. These are the cold-edged marginal spaces within their own worlds, disconnected to ruins and places of history and identity. Months before (and left for years)this was a wasteland where people walked.