Beyond Man & Time

Inspired by the work Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1885) by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Man & Time reflects the juxtaposition between a vast landscape, solitude and enigma of existence. Presenting a present-day visual record of Nietzsche’s wanderings in Sils Maria, Switzerland, the work develops the author’s concepts toward both metaphysical and ethical importance. With Nietzsche’s main character (Zarathustra) leaving home to retreat into the mountains to find enlightenment, he describes the setting as ‘6000 feet beyond man and time’, triggering a major idea relating to the eternal recurrence of the same and a meaning toward the purpose of human existence.

Two Dogs Foraging

In 1985 ITN filmed around the West Granton Housing estate in North Edinburgh. The video interviews members of the local residents about life on the scheme and how their lives have changed due to the problems of drug addiction. The work Two Dogs Foraging uses the auto-text used in downloading archival film footage, deliberately includes terms, and describes a scene within the ITN footage. Using a letterpress, in order to juxtapose the utilisation of traditional techniques with the digital age, the work re-evaluates the use of auto-text and digital archiving and how words are used to describe signs of deprivation.

Grow-Decay

Having made their home in Sipson, West London, in 2010, a group of squatters transformed a derelict plot of land into a community market garden in a bid to prevent a third runway from being built at Heathrow Airport. Under the name 'Grow Heathrow', the group were not prepared to give up their self-built homes easily and offered their supporters workshops and coaching lessons on how to defend the land. The group of squatters occupied a slice of greenbelt land, seducing their supporters with a post on their website offering up nature's rewards and helping to clear the site of thirty tonnes of rubbish and building a self-sufficient community. The residents cared for the land, building homes from trees, selling produce in the local shop and offering workshops on subjects from bike maintenance to foraging. The group wanted to create an environment for the residents of Sipson at a time when there is anticipation of a new runway at Heathrow. The work Grow-Decay was a five-year study of the people, landscapes and objects used to sustain the fight against the local authorities and an observation of how a resistant camp was used to effectively condemn a mission.

Valley of the Flowers

The Bozeman Trail was an overland route connecting the gold rush territory of Montana to the Oregon Trail. Its most important period was from 1863–68. Despite its name, "the major part of the route in Wyoming used by all Bozeman Trail travellers in 1864 flowing of pioneers and settlers through the territory of American Indians which provoked resentment and future wars. The challengers to the route were newly arrived Lakotas and their Indian allies, the Arapahoe and the Cheyenne. The United States put emphasis on a right to "establish roads, military and other posts" as described in Article 2 in the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851. All parties in the conflict had signed that treaty. The Crow Indians held the treaty right to the contested area and had called it their homeland for decades. The U.S. Army undertook several military campaigns against the hostile Indians to try to control the trail. The project The Valley of the Flowers is named after the city of Bozeman and is a contemporary reflection upon a racially segregated area of land. Taken on film, the work was created using tripods, a method that slows the pace of image-making down, enabling a greater engagement with its subjects.

Keep Leith Labour

Inspired by the archival photograph Pilton, Edinburgh taken in 1986 by documentary photographer Graham MacIndoe everyday life around the Scottish capital. MacIndoe’s photograph presents a subject presenting to the photographer the sign KEEP LEITH LABOUR. Taken in the notorious housing scheme of Pilton, North Edinburgh the work links to MP for Leith Commons Ron Brown was a fervent anti-poll tax campaigner and, despite being often pilloried and ridiculed by the parliamentary establishment and certain sections of the media, he and his wife May were a formidable duo who stood up for the people of Leith and had the courage to take up causes which other politicians were afraid to touch. The work KEEP LEITH LABOUR re-evaluates the symbolism used to persuade residents of Pilton and North Edinburgh to vote for the Labour cause. Created using Adobe Illustrator and printed with a risograph machine from Out of the Blue, Leith, Edinburgh, the work experiments with the use of colours within political campaigns and the use of archives.

England, Half English

Published in 1961 England, Half English by Colin Macinness (1914-1976) is considered one of the first post-war style sub-culture essayist. His publication consisted of several small, informal essays about the English, English culture and multiculturalism. Macinness observed the nuances of the everyday life of English citizens and the idiosyncrasies of the English environment. Considering the partial identity of being English, the project England, Half English takes its influence from the wishing to fit to a culture that you only partially belong. To undertake the project has assumed a national consideration of region and place. Rather than avoid any cliché or stereotypes, the work considers English identity and regional differences. Taken within numerous locations the work reflects both a romanticised and realistic version of the foreign photographer within the English space. As stated by Dan Jacobson in the New Statesman: ‘to read England, Half English is to be reminded how few writers there are nowadays who are prepared even to attempt what should be the writer's first task; simply to tell us how we live’.

Not Our Future

The Wendover Active Resistance (W.A.R.) camp was located on a narrow area of land between the A413 and the local Chiltern railway line south of the town of Wendover, Buckinghamshire. Destroyed in late-2021 the camp opposed the construction of the HS2 railway line and their handling of local ecology. The camp housed a tunnel, built treehouses and erected a fifteen-metre high tower, all in order to keep the eviction team at bay. Taken in late-2021 the photographic work Not Our Future presents the activists, their environment and the materials used to promote their cause. Alongside the photographs are appropriated banners, flags and signs that display a narrative of their protest. The work brings together a time in recent history that formed a resistance to the ongoing fight with the HS2 development.

On-Sea

In 1974 the iconic and posthumous publication A Day Off: An English Journal (1974) was published. The publication uncovered the work by English photographer Tony Ray-Jones who responded to the differing ways that the English spend their leisure time. Subdivided into chapters (The Seaside, Summer Carnivals, Dancers, London, Society) the imagery helps understand a photographer that went from a scholarship at Yale University to the street photographs of New York City and then his departure for Britain in late 1965. Ray-Jones completed many lists of locations that he believed best summed up differing English identity; one being the seaside. The notebooks - within which the lists are found - are now stored at the National Media Museum, Bradford. Ray-Jones’s notebook also contained a list of English seaside towns, where the photographer ticked off locations he had been to. Unfortunately, in late-1971 the photographer was diagnosed with leukaemia and died on 13th March 1972 at the age of thirty. The work On-Sea is homage to Ray-Jones and his lists on the English seaside. With several locations having not been photographed by Ray-Jones, the project focuses on certain locations that end on-sea and documents the subjects and seascapes found there.

The Rain Came

Something strange was happening over Pilton. Probably not just Pilton, Coco Bryce considered, but as he was in Pilton, the here and now was all that concerned him. He gazed up at the dark sky. It seemed to be breaking up. Part of it had been viciously slashed open, and Coco was disconcerted by what appeared to be ready to spill from its wound. Shards of bright neon-like light luminated in the parting. Coco could make out the ebbs and flows of currents within a translucent pool which seemed to be accumulating behind the darkened membrane of the sky, as if in readiness to burst through the gap, or at least rip the wounded cloud-cover further. However, the light emanating from the wound seemed to have a narrow and self-contained range; it didn’t light up the planet below. Then the rain came: at first a few warning spits, followed by a hollow explosion of thunder in the sky. Coco saw a flash of lightning where his glowing vision had been and although unnerved in a different way, he breathed a sigh of relief that his strange sighting had been superseded by more earthly phenomena. - Irvine Welsh, The Acid House, 1994

Martello Court

There is a lot of discussion at present about what our towns and cities will look and feel like in the post-COVID world. A death spiral of economic activity and loss of both permanent and transient populations, could lastingly render the centres barren wastelands, redundant in many different senses. With tourist numbers in decline and employees choosing to work from home, the whole service infrastructure required is becoming obsolete. The flip side, is that people are fostering an interest in localism, in how peoples’ immediate environment can serve their daily and weekly needs by starting to re-imagine what life could be like without the imperative for travelling and commuting for entertainment, employment and enjoyment. In a sense, much of this reconfiguration has already taken place. Many of the communities housed in the areas surrounding our big cities have changed dramatically in the last three decades. They are urecognisable from what they looked like, at least, in the past. Whilst many of these changes have been cosmetic, masking deep, underlying societal problems, there’s no doubt that by altering their physical appearance, many of our peripheral housing estates, for example, have been given an outward appearance of change and improvement. One such place is Muirhouse, one of a collection of housing schemes in the north of Edinburgh developed in the 1950s as the original process of reconfiguring the city’s centre took place. This involved slum clearing – some would say slum cleansing – scattering the capital’s population to the edges of the city, dispersing communities and displacing many of the chronic problems largely out-of-sight on Edinburgh’s fringes. To anyone growing up in that era, places such as Muirhouse were often labelled with descriptions such as ‘notorious’, ‘violent’ or ‘deprived’ and were seen, if they were ever looked at, as a blight on the city, best ignored and forgotten about. The architecture was grey and brutal, with the area being dominated by the Soviet-style Martello Court, a 200-foot, 23 story edifice which became the epicentre and synonym for all the area’s problems. Almost 30 years ago, network photographer John Sturrock chronicled the community as part of the Positive Lives - Responses to HIV photodocumentary project which graphically laid bare many of the challenges facing the people of Muirhouse at the time: crime, poverty, drugs, disease. Nevertheless, what was also communicated was a strong sense of resistence and community camaraderie. A feeling that people could, and would, survive. In recent years, Document Scotland has featured the work of two other photographers who have both made work on the estate: Yoshi Kametani’s often wry and colourful portrait of the place and Paul Duke’s No Ruined Stone, an insider’s view, which laced reality with positivity. This year, as the privations of lockdown gripped the nation, photographer Paul S. Smith embarked on his own project to document and interpret life in Muirhouse. Born in England, Paul’s family moved to Edinburgh when he was a boy, and he grew up in one of the more leafy areas of the city outside of Muirhouse. His memories tally with those of so many of the place, negative stereotypes reinforced by hearsay, rumour and suspicion. It is to his credit that, three decades on, he has chosen to revisit his childhood and confront these memories and prejudices. Colin McPherson, ‘Returning to Muirhouse: Martello Court’, 11th September 2020