Notes

Field reports, observations, and essays from the studio and the street. On cities, surfaces, photography, and the work of paying attention.

What happens to a wall: the archaeology of street surfaces in post-regeneration London

A city regenerates. Scaffolding goes up. Hoardings appear. When they come down, everything is clean and new and identical. But before that moment — in the weeks and months when the old surface is still present, still legible — there is a brief window in which the entire history of a place is visible at once.

On photographing buildings that don’t know they’re beautiful

There is a category of architecture that does not expect to be looked at. Industrial units. Utility buildings. The backs of things. These structures were built to function, not to be admired — and that indifference to the gaze is precisely what makes them worth photographing.

Scanning as documentation: capturing ephemeral surfaces before they disappear

A scanner is not a camera. It has no lens, no depth of field, no perspective distortion. It records a surface in contact — flat, total, without interpretation. This is both its limitation and its particular power as a documentary tool.