Although I am still finding my voice as a photographer, there are clear themes that have become central to my practice and which I will continue to explore and develop through my current and future projects. My area of focus is on life in the cities and suburbs of the UK and on urban photography as a genre. This is a relatively new and sometimes contested genre that has evolved in the last decade but one in which I feel I can locate my current photographic practice.

“In a nutshell, urban photography is more than typical street photography, because it includes everything that can be found within a modern city – architecture, decay, human subjects, various inanimate objects and all that is in between them – any kind of correlations, either figurative or abstract ones. Certain subcategories of socially engaged urban photography tend to be critical rather than simply consumable and they usually have a deeper meaning under the veil of appealing aesthetics. The best way to understand urban photography is to see it as a natural extension of street photography.” (Widewalls, 2016)

Locating myself contextually within this broad area of photography that incorporates so many different styles and contextual references, will allow me to create a visual narrative around urban life and key themes I’ve identified as inherent to modern urban life in the UK. Although I will be working within the scope of the local environment, these themes may touch upon issues that are reflected on a global scale and which are certainly linked to global changes, including issues such as gentrification.

I will focus initially on my local environment, the city of Bristol with a specific interest in the city centre, Stokes Croft and the neighbouring communities. Each of these areas of the city has a very unique and distinct character of its own and is either already experiencing rapid change or is likely to be threatened by it. In my explorations of the urban landscape, my observation has been that there is an architecture of change, a design to it – there is a cycle where places and communities are ‘forgotten’ or neglected and they are allowed to fall into neglect, decay and degeneration, which is then followed by rapid modernisation, ‘urban renewal’ projects and ultimately gentrification with no regard for the impact on the community or its wellbeing.

Based on this trend happening throughout UK cities, I see the same happening within Bristol. The unique character of Stokes Croft and the city centre are at risk of being lost to change, modernisation and cultural erasure. At the centre of these areas and inseparable from this issue, is a contentious underpass called The Bearpit which encapsulates the friction and tension building up within the city in the current socio-economic climate of inequality.

What was once a vibrant community project that had transformed a neglected underpass into a space that encouraged street art, freedom of speech with independent billboards and edible gardens, was impacted by austerity and the social issues it causes. In June this year, the local Council ‘locked it down’ after an incident, removing those who inhabited this space and stripping away all that was left in the Bearpit, including the street art. My theory is that this is the beginning of a process of gentrification that will extend from the Bearpit to Stokes Croft and the neighbouring areas. My project will involve documenting this process.

The nature of the Bearpit as an underpass, makes it an interstitial space that exists in a type of ‘no man’s land’ between places, yet at the same time it is the vital link connecting them. This embodies the concept of non-space, a neologism termed by the French anthropologist, Marc Augé and which refers to anthropological spaces of transience that do not hold enough significance to be viewed as places. Nonplace photography is an important component to my own photographic practice as these are so often the forgotten spaces of post-capitalist inequality, existing on the vague borders between neglected and decaying areas and the shiny structures of modern urbanisation.

I have observed that non-places and areas of urban degeneration tend to be areas that attract street art and graffiti, another aspect of the urban landscape to which I am repeatedly drawn and which offers an alternative form of social commentary about these spaces. Perhaps it is the illegal nature of street art that relegates it to the anonymity of non-spaces yet I propose that this in turn has transformed it into a unique subculture that has found a place within non-place. This is a concept I will also continue to explore within my local environment and other cities I may visit.

References:

Widewalls. (2019). Capturing the City: Urban Photography and Urban Photographers. [online] Available at: https://www.widewalls.ch/urban-photography-photographers/ [Accessed 8 Dec. 2019].

Augé, M. (1995). Non-places: Introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity (trans. J. Howe). London: Verso.