Traces alleyways & spandrels
Why do I
photograph? Because for me it is an essential way of seeing, of exploring and
understanding something or somewhere.
Im drawn to the traces people leave, the evidence or signs that the camera can discover, often seeming to find them in unnoticed or disregarded terrain.
The principle of exchange states that every contact leaves a trace that with contact between two things there will be an exchange. I see this as being not only the exchange that takes place between inhabitant and place, but also between photographer and place the trace of light on film an exchange.
I find
myself searching for these traces, this evidence, collecting it and trying to
make sense of it - trying to interpret it in some way reaching provisional
conclusions which are then either discarded or built on.
Which is how I come to be photographing alleyways (and spandrels Im drawn to both meanings of the word: its architectural use, which seems applicable to urban planning, and also its appropriation by evolutionary biologists: a sort of unintended consequence of no practical use, but which is there nonetheless. It seems in many ways to apply to the unintended places and terrain vague of the suburbs),
Alleyways
(and spandrels)
Over time
in a new city, trying slowly to make sense of it, I eventually became aware of
the suburban alleyways (this city has over 1100km of alleys), seeing them as
being un-regarded or hidden routes and pathways through the city. Essentially
unnoticed and much of the time un-peopled. Yet full of the evidence of people.
Things left over. Things to be discarded. Things waiting to be used. A
different viewpoint on peoples lives. A city's back lanes are a shadowy mirror of the more respectable street grid. Back yards often seem less regarded than
front gardens (though not always). Back gardens are frequently more relaxed,
off-guard, and by the time the alley is reached, it is dustbins and recycling
boxes and left over bricks and spare siding. Though every now and then this is
punctuated by a garden of beauty and pride.
The
alleyways are the pathways through this. Still public, but offering more
intimate glimpses of these places. Domain of dog walkers; jogging soccer moms; garbage
collectors; handymen repairing fences; fierce, withered old ladies on solitary
walks; schoolboys dreaming and imagining adventures. Yet all these encountered
only infrequently. More often it is the traces, the evidence of these lives
that is encountered.
In all
this I have found myself looking at these places from an oblique perspective
(though still with the occasional clear, wide view) detailed, close-up, off-centre.
Timothy Atherton