Urban Traces on the Slopes

This series highlights a part of Sheffield that very rarely features in tourist photographs or civic boosterism. These are the alleys and aged buildings dotted through the hilly terrain of the city. Many of these edifices look empty or deserted. Their walls are pocked with cracks, their windows shattered, and every surface is a canvas for graffiti. These signs are messy, but they speak an urban language from the margins. They are signs of resistance, of speech, of being, scored into disused places.



I will be photographing with ultra wide angle lenses, and tilt-shift perspectives, not for their humorous effects but rather to keep the sense of physical imbalance derived from the land in the pictures. Differences in texture of wall and pavement are brought out by natural light at dawn and dusk as quickly as one notices how time has adhered on the environment. Every frame captures not just architectural decay but a place caught between the use of the past and the detachment of the future.



It’s entirely possible these buildings were once the homes of workers, sections of storage units, or extensions of factories. Today they are no longer a part of history or progress. They are not preserved monuments, nor are they fully wiped away. They stand as indeterminate urban monuments to memory without narration.