Through The Lens #6

#6: Street photography at Christmas

Christmas shoppers on the steps of the statute of Eros in Piccadilly Circus

On Sunday, I ventured into West London, just as the sun was setting, to document the Christmas shoppers. The area around Oxford Street, Regent Street, Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square is always busy, filled with tourists and theatre goers, shoppers and socialites. But, as Christmas approaches, a new fervour descends and hundreds of thousands converge on the trendy boutiques, high street chains and designer stores, all in search of the illusive Christmas present. This leads to a thronging mass of highly stressed, tired and grouchy adults, over-excited children and over-enthusiastic sales people promoting whatever it is they are paid to promote. Wrapped up in coats, hats, scarves and gloves, this mass of people slowly trudges and weaves around each other like a gigantic, disorientated shoal of fish, awkward bags and boxes protruding out here and there, the crowds parting around them like ice floes on the bow of an icebreaker.

As the light faded, the experience became very surreal. The varying light from the shop fronts, adverts and Christmas decorations sent strange colours dancing over faces. Deep shadows obscured everything below the shoulders of the tightly packed crowds, with only the occasional beam of light from a passing bus or taxi penetrating this murk, usually revealing a pram stuffed full of bags, a baby’s head in a novelty Christmas hat poking out among them.

For photography, and particularly street photography, this is an ideal location to capture human life in all its strange, exotic ways. The crowds and darkness offer a protection from keen-eyed pedestrians, meaning you can catch people unaware (and therefore acting ‘naturally’, or as naturally as anyone does when they are performing in public).

It was a beautiful sunset on this particular evening, which cast a lovely sanguine glow over the buildings and the heads of those on the streets, whilst the violent blues, purples, whites and greens which burst out of the hoardings, billboards and shop windows contrasted nicely against this. I had put a 6-point starlight filter on my 35mm lens and opened the aperture to f/2 (partly to compensate for the low light levels but also to empahsise the starlight effect the filter creates). This gave every image a slightly soft glow, creating an ethereal atmosphere opposed to the manic reality of Christmas shopping in central London.

Photography can be a very isolating activity; you are an outsider, an onlooker, watching moments unfold in front of you but never fully engaging with them. You step into someone else’s life for a brief moment, freeze it, and then step out into anonymity again. I’m usually drawn to the more banal things, which are gone just as quickly as they occur. These are moments you are drawn to when you are on the 'outside'. In their very banality, they are almost the essence of human existence; the father and son mock-fighting over a stuffed bear, the family trying to read the bus timetable, the strange facial expressions people pull in reaction to some unheard comment or internal thought. It’s these things which unite us all as people in some way.

I tend to walk quickly, weaving through the crowds, surveying everything and shooting a frame when I spot something vaguely different or which I think may evolve (this could be someone reading a map, pulling a face for no apparent reason, wearing interesting clothing etc), before vanishing into the crowd again. My aim is to be unnoticed, but I’ve found that if I am seen, a look of total indifference seems to diffuse any situation. And given my face’s natural tendency to look inherently bored and emotionless, this is quite easy. If I look so totally disinterested that I couldn’t possibly have been taking a picture then, hopefully, they’ll believe I wasn’t photographing them. Of course, this doesn’t always work, in which case a smile and nod of acknowledgment works. Maybe even a conversation if they engage with me. Interestingly though, most people are so wrapped up in their own worlds that they barely notice anything going on around them (the massive crowds only increases invisibility).

There are occasions where I spot something about to happen, or anticipate the event. In these instances, I usually have to double back on myself, or work out where the best place to stand will be to get the picture (spotting an advert on a bus about to pass someone, or a pair of unrelated events which are about to coincide and be frozen forever in an image, which then gives them an entirely different meaning). Piccadilly Circus was particularly good for this, as it is a major crossroads filled with people all going to different places. Generally, any intersections where people’s paths meet will lead to odd moments of serendipity. The ancient Greeks had a word for this: Kairos. 

Street photography isn’t an easy thing to do, and for someone who is naturally shy, it can take a lot of determination to walk up to a person, stick a camera in their face for a reason they will never really know, and then walk off, often without even speaking a word. It requires a sort of faux-confidence, a 'camera persona'. I have to push myself into situations, forcing myself out of my comfort zone and into the personal space of a complete stranger, but, as Robert Capa famously said: “If your photographs aren’t good enough, then you’re not close enough.”

See more of my street photography on my website

Read previous Photographic Stories here

Brick Lane and Spitalfields; A Review

I went to have a look…this is what I found

Spitalfields is in London’s East End, near Liverpool Street Station. At its centre is Brick Lane, which runs north-south from Shoreditch to Whitechapel. This is true ‘east-end’ territory. At least it was in the 17th-19th centuries when the area was developed. The current architectural ‘look’ is from the late 18th and early 19th century, as the industrial revolution fuelled urban growth and attracted thousands to the city for work in the new factories (the area sits on several major railway routes, which no doubt helped). Through the 19th century, the area descended into a cesspit of slums rife with disease and poverty, and the name Spitalfields essentially becoming a by-word for “dump”.

However, like almost all the once-grotty areas of inner-London, it has been reclaimed and gentrified and is full of ‘trendy’ folk and millions upon millions of tourists. This is partly thanks to The City being right next door (its glass and steel phallic temples…and the Gherkin…now tower over the old Victorian streets and reflect the sunlight down some of them creating a surreal, film-set like atmosphere). Somewhat inevitably, the whole area is now the sort of place people go to be a bit ‘edgy’ or ‘alternative’ and experience ‘sub-culture’ (whatever that is) for the afternoon. Or they go there because they’ve been told to: “oh, but you MUST visit Brick Lane!”. So they do, whilst supping on a hot mocha-locha-cappa-spreso or something, and eating quinoa (whatever that is, again). Basically, it all comes across as a bit pretentious and a bit…fake. Which is a shame. 

The area around Brick Lane is famed for its various markets, street stalls and urban ‘street art’ of varying quality and purpose. It appears that, at some point a few years ago, when it was still a bit rubbish and run down (and therefore cheap), a skint artist, or student, or something, sprayed some paint on the wall and it didn’t get removed by the authorities. Then other entrepreneurial people started doing it and formed a little arty community making murals on the walls and shops around the area. And they are, overall, pretty good. Then people began visiting the area to see the artwork and realised they quite liked this slightly dingy urban area they’d tried their best to ignore previously (“I mean, really, who gets the Circle Line past King’s Cross?”). They told all their friends about it and before you know it, the old market was redeveloped, the chain stores flooded in to leach off the older, traditional traders’ bemused clientelle, and the middle classes rolled in for the afternoon. The whole place is now a simulacrum of itself. The story of London, encapsulated within a medium-sized-Victorian-indoor-market. 

Inevitably, the Tourists got wind of this ‘cor blimey guv’nor!’ bit of London, and hot on their heels were the over-priced stalls and ‘arts and crafts’ shops selling ‘vintaaaage clothing, yah.’ Thus, another area became another monster; posing and preening itself for the masses. A monstrous Disney-like parody, somewhere between Mary Poppins’ London and Quadrophenia. It even got a new train station and was moved into Zone One (higher price tickets, you see).

Despite all this, it is still worth going around and having a look for the afternoon. After all, it’s so artificial it’s a spectacle in its own right, like Covent Garden. Plus, it is one of the few areas where you can still get a sense of what Victorian London would have been like (if you look up at the buildings or bother to wander down one of the quieter side streets), but don’t expect to find anything too genuine. There are no petticoated whores in doorways, not even on Petticoat Lane. The gas-lamps and smog have gone, and horses aren’t emptying their bowels on every corner. Be prepared to queue for hours behind hundreds of people taking pictures of what’s been painted on the wall too. It’s very much a typical ‘hip’ London district now, like Hackney or Soho. One for the tourists. 

Life as a Job Hunting Graduate

My experience as an unemployed graduate...

Just over a year ago, after completing my degree but unemployed, I realised I would have to sign up for Job Seeker’s Allowance (JSA). I was lucky enough to be able to move back and live with my parents after university, but money for my phone, transport and so on was something I had to find myself, and that is perfectly understandable. Obviously, I wanted to start my own life, however, eight weeks into being a graduate, I still hadn’t found any form of work and my overdraft was expended, I had sold everything I no longer felt I needed (including a lot of my camera equipment) and I had run out of money.

So, with the dawning realisation that finding a job (any job, let alone a graduate job) was going to be harder than I had naively hoped, I cycled the 5 miles to my nearest job centre and asked to sign on. They sent me straight back home to do it online, as that’s how it is done now. This was early October 2012. Finally, in November, I was invited to a meeting at the Job centre. I sat with an advisor and went into more detail about myself, handed over a CV and was assigned a permanent advisor who I was required to visit once a week (I was offered the chance of choosing my day and time so I picked Friday at 8:30am, the first slot of the day (when the centre is quietest)). For privacy reasons, I’ll name my advisor ‘Clare’.

The sickly green of the Job Centre sign. Image courtesy of the Guardian.

My first meeting went well; we set up my job search preferences on the system (journalism, photography, media) and discussed my background. Needless to say, the Job Centre isn’t really geared towards graduates and I knew my job preferences wouldn’t show up many results. There seems to be an attitude that graduates walk into work straight from university and that Mummy and Daddy will pay for them if they don’t. This is partly true (as mentioned with my accommodation situation) but my family is nowhere near wealthy enough to simply fund my unemployment, particularly when unpaid internships and grad-schemes are becoming more and more commonplace, and with two siblings at university too. Hence my signing-on.

This lack of understanding of graduates revealed itself in all its glory in my second week on JSA. Part of the ‘deal’ of receiving JSA is that one is expected to comply with certain rules and conditions (applying to a minimum of three jobs each week, attending all of your appointments, demonstrating a commitment to finding work, being available for work…all things the majority of job seekers do without the condescending attitude from the Job Centre). You are also expected to attend training workshops to ‘help’ you. My experience of these ‘workshops’ is as follows:

I was told to attend a two hour session on ‘finding work’ one Thursday afternoon. I thought this may include interview tips, cv writing skills, covering letter writing and so on. These were things I had had access to at university so I was little irritated at having to go through more, especially as I didn’t expect it to be as high-quality, but there may have been benefits to it. And when you’re unemployed, filling two hours of your day with something vaguely productive is always a good thing. I cycled to the job-centre (something I was already becoming familiar with doing; a true Norman Tebbit cliche) and sat down with five others (we were grouped by age). The advisor doing the ‘course’ was actually a person who had gone into the Job Centre after losing his job behind a bar and they’d given him a job in the centre itself. Not exactly a professional in the field of employment, then. His main piece of wisdom from the 40 minutes we were there (what happened to the two hours?) was that “looking online” is a good thing to try and that “having a cv is very important”. These are genuine things I was told. Needless to say, I felt I had just wasted a lot of time that could have been spent filling in applications (at this point I was averaging three applications a week).  The only useful thing was the list of job websites I was given. But even then, I had already signed up to five or six by that point.

I made my feelings about this workshop clear to Clare, but she simply said that I had to go to these sessions because that was part of the ‘contract’. At this point, I should mention that my JSA was contribution based; essentially, I was being paid an amount which reflected the tax I had paid during the previous five years of work I had been doing, first as a full time sales assistant in a shop and then as a contracted photographer at my university during my student years. To this end, I had effectively paid my JSA through my own taxes and was not claiming from others’ taxes. This is the same for the majority of claimants.

 As December rolled along I widened my search. I had initially been looking for graduate work in the field I was interested in, as most people would do. Sadly, the things I am vaguely skilled at and have knowledge of are arts-based. And the arts industry is essentially in a freelance free-fall to wageless oblivion. So, swallowing my pride and desires to work in a graduate job I wanted, I began looking for other jobs too. I was now applying to an average of ten jobs per week, ranging from bar work, nightclub photography, shelf stacking, graduate schemes, internships, medical photography, shop work, voluntary positions and so on. I was even applying to jobs I was unsure I could get to or afford to travel to/move location for (jobs in Derby, Leek, Stafford, London, Bristol, Wales, Scotland, Hungary, Viet Nam etc). I was mainly receiving the infuriating “due to the volume of applicants we cannot provide feedback” rejection emails, if I received a reply at all. The Job Centre provided no help. Clare had kindly allowed me to visit once a fortnight, as I was meeting all of their requirements, but during these 20 minute Friday morning meetings, I merely showed her my job search records, signed the forms to get the JSA and sighed a lot about the fact I was still unemployed despite having a degree and a lot of extra-curricular skills and experience on top of it.

I had started a short course to add shorthand to my abilities, as this appeared to be something required of those hoping to go into media (in particular, it was a requirement for one graduate scheme I was applying to). For six hours a week I was learning how to write squiggly lines, and the rest was spent applying to jobs and boosting my photographic portfolio. Christmas came and went. I had now passed 200 applications to jobs as varied as fork-lift truck driver and a medical photographer in a dentist’s practice. Still nothing. I was struggling to find voluntary things to do (Birmingham has the youngest population in Europe, and also had some of the highest unemployment in the UK at the time) and I had even been in the infuriating position of being told I was over-skilled for some shop work I had applied to, despite having extensive retail experience. In hind-sight, I could have dumbed down my CV more for these non-graduate jobs, but after three years of university I think I felt that my degree qualification should be something I should be proud of and highlight. It cost me the best of the £30,000!

Of the 250 or so applications I had done by the end of January 2013, Clare had probably been responsible for 12 of them. The Job Centre had effectively been little more than an (ugly and unwelcoming) administrative building I went to, to receive money. In the first week of February, something happened which shocked me. By now, the job centre had moved to an online portal, through which job seekers have to keep a record of all of their search activity, upload a cv and demonstrate how they are looking for work. This is a reasonable expectation, despite it infringing somewhat on privacy, as the Department for Work and Pensions demands access to everything on there. This means the advisor also has access and can recommend a job to you. When they say ‘recommend’ they actually mean “APPLY TO THIS JOB NOW!”

Clare had picked a job as an optical technician or something. It was a job in an optician’s, responsible for their image archive. It sounded quite interesting and I would have applied even if it hadn’t been mandatory. I left the job centre and went home (I’d usually be home by 10am, so had the whole day to do applications and my shorthand course).  I applied to seven jobs that day. However, Clare’s link on the job search system didn’t work. This wasn’t the first, second or even 10^th time this had happened and I was used to it. I looked up the company who had posted the job and went to their site, but the job was no longer listed. Thinking nothing of it other than mild disappointment, I assumed my seven other job applications that day (let alone the seven or so I had done earlier in the week) would more than meet the minimum of three I had to apply to.

A week later, Clare saw that I hadn’t applied to the job she had selected. I explained what had happened and about the 14 other applications I had done that week, which she could see online too, but she said she would “have” to sanction me. A sanction is a thirteen week suspension of your JSA. For me, this was frustrating. But for someone who depended on that money to pay bills, or rent, or to eat? How is that possibly going to help them find work? What’s more, it was the dreadful website system that had caused this problem in the first place. It wasn’t my fault they had listed a job that no longer existed. And now I had lost my only source of income despite having applied to over 250 jobs in three months. (During this week I had also been rejected from a £17,000 a year job working for Eurostar as a part-time copy-writer, because I was ‘overly skilled for the position’. That phrase is the one which always left me feeling utterly hopeless and lost. How can you ever be over-skilled for something? Surely that’s just a benefit?).

Annoyed about the lack of common sense, discretion, and the injustice I felt I had received due to incompetence elsewhere, I appealed the decision. Almost absurdly, whilst the appeal is on-going you still have to attend the job centre every week and continue to meet all the requirements they place on you, even though you are no longer getting anything from them in return expect a smug superiority and the feeling of being the base of society. My first appeal was rejected by the middle of March. I later found out that the people who judged my appeal were the same people who enforced the sanction…because that’s a fair system. From my viewpoint, it appeared no logic or thinking had gone into the decision; the circumstances and my records had clearly not been looked at. So I appealed again.

Luckily, by the middle of March 2013, some former colleagues had recommended me for a job and I had been offered a part-time position in a shop. The sanctions no longer mattered and I gladly signed off, hopefully to never, ever go through this situation again. My second appeal was still pending and I heard nothing about it once I singed off.

In April, I was offered an interview for a graduate position in London (my 286th job application). Ten days later I was offered the job and moved down to the South East in May, as I had always suspected I would end up having to do. My quest to find a graduate position had finally ended, and I was even working in something vaguely close to my original hopes and getting paid far more than I had ever hoped. A far cry from the dark days of December when I had lost all self-esteem and belief in myself and for the first time since being a young child, had at one point broken down in tears because of the hopelessness. JSA gladly faded from memory until one day in July, a whole six months after I was first sanctioned, I received a random payment into my bank account. No letter, phone call or email, just a payment that matched the exact amount I had not been paid whilst sanctioned. I had to phone up to clarify.

I was lucky JSA was merely there to help me afford travel, a phone and to slowly clear my credit card and overdraft debts. Had I depended on that to survive, I don’t know what I would have done. I was wrongly, unfairly and pointlessly sanctioned by an over-zealous and incompetent service which does not help those it is supposed to. It demoralises, demonises and ridicules those that use its service, making them jump through higher and higher hoops and punishing them for petty and minor things. And I had been lucky enough to avoid the work-fare scheme!

I doubt I am the only person to experience this, and if you haven’t, I sincerely hope you never have to. 

Note: I kept a record of all of my job applications as part of my requirements to receive JSA and for personal records. I still have this file as testament to the amount of applications I sent.

The London Underground

Suddenly everyone is getting the Underground…but not to the very end. 

   I see that Messrs Martin and…Z(?)…caught the tube the other day. To go a gig at the 02.  Their gig. Apparently this was amazing (because this sort of thing is considered beyond the intellect of most famouses, presumably) and shows how down-to-Earth they are. Quite. I imagine them, and their significant entourages, topping up their Oyster cards after queueing up for 20 minutes at the only working ticket machine in the over-crowded rush-hour concourse of Liverpool Street. How normal they are.

   Anyway, as a genuine passenger of the tube, I've been exploring the network from end-to-end for the past few weeks. My project to document the last station on each of the lines is well underway. I've been to the quiet, rural town of Chesham (northern Metropolitan Line),  explored the hustle and bustle of Brixton's markets (southern Victoria Line) and been out into deepest Essex, to the town of Upminster, at the end of the District Line.

   The London Underground is a vast network with over 270 stations and its lines covering hundreds of miles in total. Each of the 11 underground lines has at least two termini, with  the majority of lines having many more. Most people only experience this world-famous underground railway system within the confines of central London, where they feed the tourist sites and businesses that fuel London. And it rips ignorant tourists off, partly thanks to Harry Beck's geography-defying map resulting in thousands of unnecessary journeys (Leicester Square to Covent Garden being the most infamous of these).

   But venture farther afield, and you'll see the types of passenger change, the numbers dwindle, the tunnels open out into vast suburbs or rolling fields and hills; and experience the strange sensation of reaching the point at which the train can go no further. It is here that I am going; spending roughly one hour exploring the square mile around the station. One hour may not sound like much time, nor one square mile (roughly) sound like a huge area, but the purpose of this decision is to contrast it with the termination of the train's journey. The train spends most of its day rushing between stations, so when it finally comes to a halt, it seems only fitting to carry on that rushed attitude on foot. Besides, even out in the distant suburbs of Greater London, a lot happens within one hour and one square mile. 

   There is also a logistical aspect to limiting my time to one hour and a reasonably small distance: the volume of images. With so many destinations, it would simply be overwhelming to spend indefinite amounts of time at each terminus. One hour limits my picture-taking to a specific time-frame, meaning I capture a small glimpse of life at the terminus, and preserve it in images. Obviously, there are drawbacks to this approach, such as missing events or arriving somewhere when something unusual happens to be taking place, but at the same time doing this helps to focus what is otherwise a huge undertaking. The authenticity and realism of the images will not be diminished by the time-scale in which they were produced.

The termini and lines I will eventually have covered are:

Metropolitan Line: Amersham, Chesham, Watford, Uxbridge, Aldgate

Bakerloo Line: Harrow & Wealdstone, Elephant & Castle

Jubilee Line: Stanmore, Stratford

Northern Line: Edgware, Mill Hill East, High Barnet, Morden 

Piccadilly Line: Cockfosters, Heathrow Terminal 5, Uxbridge (shared with Metropolitan Line)

Victoria Line: Walthamstow Central, Brixton

Central Line: Epping, Ealing Broadway (shared with District Line), West Ruislip

District Line: Upminster, Wimbledon, Kensington Olympia, Richmond, Ealing Broadway (shared with Central Line), Edgware Road (shared with Circle Line)

Hammersmith & City Line: Hammersmith (shared with Circle Line), Barking

Waterloo & City: Bank, Waterloo

Circle Line: Edgware Road (shared with District Line), Hammersmith (shared with Hammersmith & City Line) 

I've highlighted which stations have overlapping termini. These will be treated as a single terminus and the images captured there will represent each line in the finished project. 

   

Put It Away!

What exactly are you filming?

   This is treacherous ground for me to be covering, and risks hypocrisy, but there has recently been a lot of debate over the use of cameras (particularly camera phones) and obsessive recording behaviour (ORB) at public events, and whether this is right, wrong, or necessary.

   I enjoy taking photographs. However, when I go out to events, or work on projects specifically to take photographs, I take the necessary equipment and get images to meet my brief. For everything else, I leave my cameras at home. I appear to be part of a minority though, as I discovered during the Notting Hill Carnival which has just passed. 

   There were over one million people at the carnival. Some of this number were professional photographers, videographers and film crews covering and documenting the events. They were there to capture the images and use their skills and expertise to get the best images they could. Then there were people like myself, who are building up their portfolios, enjoy photographing events but don't do it as a profession, or are students of photography etc, either way, all have gone specifically with photographing the event in mind. Finally, there are the people who went to the carnival in a social capacity. 

   It's this last group which is causing major issues for professionals, companies and businesses. The proliferation of the digital camera, now primarily found built into a mobile phone, means that almost everyone has a camera on hand. Obviously, this does have it's benefits, like turning the camera back on the surveillance state or capturing those spontaneous news moments which would otherwise be missed. But, this access to a recording device has had a strange effect on many people, by turning them into compulsive recorders. Camera zombies.

   From what I saw over the weekend, there seems to be a need to record everything. And I mean everything. I watched people standing and staring at the carnival procession…only they weren't watching it directly, they were watching it via the three inch screen held up in front of their face. Or they were randomly filming the mass of people, with no real subject  or purpose other than, I presume, proving that they were there. Which begs the questions: why did you bother going? Why not just watch clips on YouTube if you want to view everything on a screen? And what are you filming it for anyway; who is going to want to watch a shaky low-resolution clip of the backs of people's heads?

   These issues have been plaguing music and comedy gigs of late, with more and more performers demanding their audiences stop recording everything and just enjoy themselves. There are very obvious issues with this constant recording: you spend all of your time thinking about and setting up the recording you're making, rather than actually experiencing the event itself. Worse, these recordings often undermine the work of professionals employed to record the events. And, ultimately, all you have afterward is some mediocre (at best) footage of something which you will only remember through the prism of that recording. 

   Back in Notting Hill, and this one example perhaps encapsulates this obsession with recording; I saw a man spinning on the spot, his iPhone raised arbitrarily above his head as he tried to film what was going on around him (a queue for a toilet, a jerk chicken stall, some people sitting on the pavement...and about 300 other people all filming each other, filming each other, filming nothing). This footage will not have been great, and probably won't be worth viewing again. If all this footage was available to the state (and after the Edward Snowden revelation's, it could well be) then we'd never need CCTV again. 

   So why did he do it? Because he could. Because the technology is there in his hand and something, some desire within our nature, made him feel the need to record a video, to prove he was there. To prove he existed. Ironically, however, everyone around him was doing the same thing, to the extent that nobody seemed to notice anyone. This desire to record is now degrading experiences. It's time to put it away and ask yourself: is this really worth recording? What can I capture that won't be done better by someone else?

This image from the Pope's address at the Vatican is probably the most revealing example of how bad it has become.

You can view my own images from The Notting Hill Carnival at www.henrywrwhite.co.uk

The Birmingham Canals

Canal Project Is Finally Complete…

   After three months, I have finally completed my photographic project documenting the major canals within the Birmingham area. The initial idea was first conceived way back in the soggy autumn of last year, as mentioned in a previous post from October 2012: Canals. My aim was to cycle along the towpaths of the major waterways that form the Birmingham Canal Navigations, and to explore the connecting canal lines which serve this waterway system, the largest canal network in the world. And now I have finished.

   In total, I travelled, primarily by bicycle, over 250 miles, in all weathers, taking, on average, ten photographs for every ten miles of canal (although there are some exceptions). I battled ice, wind, rain, sleet, snow, sunburn, mud, floods, landslides, a menagerie of animal life, and not forgetting drunks, angry fishermen and a whole host of bizarre individuals who populate canal towpaths in winter.

   The complete project is comprised of over 1000 photographs, and to post them all online is unrealistic and unfeasible, so below is a selection from the series, which, when viewed as a set, provides a unique view into the world of Birmingham's waterways during the cold, winter months. The images capture the canals as they are when out-of-season, when foliage is minimal and the original industrial intent is more visible. The lack of people and boats often creates an erie and desolate world, dominated by dereliction and forgotten elements of history, slowly being reclaimed by nature.  It is also a time of major change for the canals, as British Waterways, the government department that has run the nation's waterways since nationalisation in 1948, has been dissolved and handed control over to the newly and specifically formed charity, The Canal and River Trust, whose job it is to maintain and preserve the country's waterways.

   Hopefully, this project will serve as a permanent record of our heritage at a pivotal moment in time…otherwise those nine punctures I had to endure during the making of it will have all been for nothing. 

   You can view the images in larger sizes by clicking on them. All photographs were taken using a Full Frame (35mm equivalent) D-SLR, with the lens set to an aperture of f/2.8. This was to try and replicate the style of photography used through the industrial revolution, when lens apertures were generally wide and fixed. Other settings varied according to each image's requirements. 

A note on watermarks: Thanks to the Government's proposed legislation, the "Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill", any images without a clear owner (aka an 'orphan' image) can potentially be used commercially without any copyright protection or compensation; in other words, if it isn't named as yours, it isn't yours any more. To avoid this, I have used prominent watermarking, as metadata is often removed during the uploading process.