What do you collect? I collect vinyl, most of mine is from the 80’s and 90’s and now I collect it not to play it but to enjoy the format, the rarity and the nostalgia. What do you remember? All the cool cars you’ve ever seen or the times you had an amazing meal? What do you notice or notice the lack of? When I first moved to London I would notice phone boxes plastered with escort flyers, or that Chicken shops all look the same, more recently Vape shops are in a similar vein. We collect memories or Typologies in our minds all the time without consciously thinking about it. I, like many photographers, take photographs of them.
People are always curious of typologies. I was hugely annoyed to discover a photographer who took pictures of everything in their home, because I didn’t think of it first. Often they are things we see every day, sometimes they are things that are hidden from us, but the repetition, whether it be in subject, composition, colour, location or all manner of different reasons is enormously interesting. Even the most banal things can be elevated to engaging by putting them side by side and inviting the viewer to observe the differences we all knew existed but never really thought about.
My first (conscious) Typology project was St Pancras Pianos. I was living in St Albans and travelling into work every day through St Pancras station and seeing people playing the public pianos, same pianos, same composition but different people, sometimes playing for an audience, often playing for themselves, in public. It was endlessly interesting to me, I can play the keyboard but not the piano and the idea of public performance is something I’d never do but the setting, the people, the concept made it fascinating. I actually contacted the artist who organises the public piano project and he replied saying the pictures made him uncomfortable as they were very voyeuristic. I was ready to do a collaboration but that’s a response I was not expecting!
Next was an idea that spanned multiple years and locations but my Spaceships project germinated from my love of Star Wars and the opening shot of the first movie where the ship transporting Princess Leia is being chased by an enormous Star Destroyer which comes into shot over our heads and keeps going and going due to it’s gargantuan size. When you look up and take a picture of a tall building, especially one made of steel and glass, and then flip the picture upside down it’s reminiscent of that enormous Star Destroyer. When you only shoot on bright sunny days when there is cloud in the sky (it reflects in a pleasing way on the glass) you notice things you didn’t even notice when you were taking the picture.
Sometimes it’s the differences that really catch your eye, in New York there is a massive culture of food carts, these are things which don’t exist in London. They take the same rough format and size but the variety is breathtaking, the lights, the LED animated signs, even the food served is different in every case and they jumped out at me when I lived there. The only consistent thing about this collection was they were shot at night because that brought out the beautiful colours.
‘Things of my life’ was my lockdown project, I bought a small lightbox from Amazon which came with multiple coloured foam sheets and I collected some items I had acquired over my life which were small enough to fit into the space. Just recently I heard of a photographer who had taken photos of everything in her house which made me furious that I hadn’t thought of it first.
And finally ‘Car Crashed’ is my latest Typology. Now I don’t commute, I try to get out for a walk every day, even if it’s only for half an hour. On my route around East London are multiple car repair shops, often under train arches and in small and cramped spaces, they have the cars they are working on parked on the street. Car ownership has changed a great deal since I was young, back in the 70’s and 80’s you’d regularly see cars being repaired and in the process of upkeep in people's drives. These days you can’t really replace much on a car yourself and the only time we see them not in pristine condition is when they’ve been in an accident. So seeing as it’s such a rare sight and the format of them side on made them an irresistible subject to capture. It’s still early days for this one but it’s been really enjoyable to capture. It’s also the first project that I’ve taken entirely on my phone.
So whilst this type of photography is not the most flashy, it can be a valuable slice of modern life and arguably the easiest type of photography to get into, what would you shoot?