December 2009
Photographing the urban environment of Belfast, the roaming denizens and their incidental happenings has drawn my gaze to people and their dynamic energy, bizarre motions that have become commonplace; as well as, the sporadic beauty found in discarded and rejected objects. The images normally considered as still life resonate with kinetic energy to depict the absent human through fleeting actions of littering and vandalism. This visual haiku, presented as a short monochromatic photo-essay, offers a cross-section on contemporary notions of identity, society, culture and urban photography. Like the city’s milling crowds and passing cars the camera’s distance from the subject ebbs and flows to provide a visual rhythm, which is sustained through the repetition of motifs such as travel, surveillance and the voyeur. Like the seemingly erratic images of cities and towns produced by Paul Graham, Alec Soth, Daido Moriyama and Jacob Aue Sobol these images, when viewed en masse, provide a personal portrait of an easily anonymous environment. By avoiding the travel brochure areas and clichéd Belfast scenes FLUX forms a poetic metropolitan meditation rather than a historical recording of a rejuvenating post-conflict city.
Roadside, I see you;
Fleeting blinks of asphalt life,
An urban snapshot.
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