one thing tales

(digital C prints; 18x13.5)

Looking out for road-dust resting on a plastic spoon, a thick imprint of tire on a double-yellow line or the way a heavy rainfall leaves dark patches around drained, discarded objects on the pavement. All these things matter. The photographs extract a human quality from small, everyday things, giving precedence to how a pin lies or the angle of the dropped lollipop .. Fragile, dispersed micro-events; a form of capturing that portrays a familiar urban environment as an endless pool of precious encounters that could easily be missed. Pavements, tarmac surfaces, drains, the streets which make up our cities: surfaces usually thought of as dirty, unforgiving and surrounded by noisy movement are transformed momentarily into a stillness where questions can be asked. It is in the questioning, the imagining of a discarded object's history and the contemplation of the time it takes for these transient things to appear and disappear in everyday life - their life within ours - where we find access to a lyricism as eccentric as it is tender.

“They were merely descriptions of objects, each story dealt with only one thing [...] they were the situation”

(Peter Handke, The Jukebox and other Essays on Storytelling, 1994)

A collection of 40 photographs presented at Solo exhibition at Viewfinder Photography Gallery London 2006.