Chaos Under Construction
Digital photography / real-time colour collage
Chaos Under Construction brings together photographs made while walking through London, York, Newcastle, St Petersburg and other cities. A street can fold across itself. A wall cuts into the sky, buildings change scale, and a passing figure gives the eye something to hold on to. Several views of the city occupy the same picture.
I work with prisms, handmade optical attachments, light filters, colour interference, reflection, and the imperfect behaviour of digital capture. The image is built while the scene is being photographed. The collage happens inside the encounter between the city, the camera, the filter, and the moving body.
Photographing this way means keeping moving. A picture begins to come together and is gone before I have quite understood it. Sometimes there is too much in the frame and nothing holds. Sometimes a small figure, a strip of colour or the edge of a building makes all the other pieces fall into place. In the photographs with people, a street can run through a body and a body can interrupt a building. Elsewhere, branches, windows and empty passages carry the picture on their own.
I like the unreasonable hope that an ordinary walk might produce the photograph I have been waiting for. There are more ways for a picture to fail when so many things are happening at once. There are also more things to find. The pleasure is in watching for them: the colour, the surprise, the moment when an arrangement I could not have planned suddenly works.
London Chaos, made in 2018, is a chapter within this wider series, with its own selection.
