The Urban

The urban conglomerate is what we call home and where economic growth, cultural activities and social buzz find fertile ground. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic outbreak cities across the world had to shut down in an effort to slow down the virus contagion and limit casualties.

Images of empty city centres and tourist less landmarks have filled the pages of news outlets, helping us to visualise the scale of the temporary stillness of urban areas across the globe. After about ten weeks in lockdown the British government is starting to gradually re-open for business. We are now challenged by the traumatic effects of the pandemic and the questions posed by the uncertain future ahead.

PHOTO MEET & NORTHERN NARRATIVES have selected 8 photographers who explored urban areas. We asked to tell us about their respective projects and to reflect on the outcomes the pandemic will be likely to materialise.

Thanks to the contributing photographers (in alphabetical order): Amanda Holdom, Claudia Orsetti, Francesco Fantini, Matt MacPake, Per-Olof Stoltz, Robert Ashby, Salvo Toscano and Tony Mcateer

“Crowned” appears to be a futuristic celebration of the urban environment, seen through the vivid colours of the overwhelming architecture you photographed. Could you tell us more about the concept and process behind your work?

Celebration is a bit strong, but an admiration of the beauty, complexity and innovation of the architecture and environments they create is certainly a part of the mix. This is global flagship architecture and I see it as representing the large systems that act on us - economy, politics, imagination and myth - there is a draw and fascination in that for me. However, my overall feeling towards this ever-burgeoning, spectacle architecture is a sense of delirium. I think this comes through in the acerbic colours and slightly off kilter, over busy compositions of the photographs. There is brazen power play and extravagance etched in the evermore elaborate facades and tech enabled structures of these buildings. This has begun to give an impression of instability and a loose grasp on reality. 

In making the work, light, composition and viewpoint are critical. I like to be mobile, so I don’t bed myself down with a heavy tripod. Being able to shift about for plays of light and composition is what I’m looking for.

The play of light on surface – reflections, shifts of colour and texture - is then pushed and emphasised in post-processing. I’m essentially looking to draw out the complexity and sense of delirium I mentioned before. Realism is very much left behind and this chimes with the corporate, capitalist culture the architecture represents. 

The number of building sites and the density of skyscrapers indicate wealth and a fast-forward approach to economy. The Coronavirus pandemic though, has imposed a temporary break from such direction. We travel less and the forthcoming recession will translate in job losses and an increment in urban poverty. In order to function, mega cities rely on what we’re unable to offer at present. Where did we go wrong? Will the work force move back to rural areas? 

As I say, I can’t help but admire the beauty and complexity of some of the architecture and the places they create, but for a long time I’ve had an overwhelming sense of folly about how more extravagant and outrageous they have become. Architects, corporations and cities trying to outdo each other, all a bit lost in their own ambition. It’s removed from reality considering the serious social, environmental and health issues facing the world. 

The Coronavirus pandemic has hammered this home. What will happen to these places? Like true follies, most of them are now sitting empty all over the world. Even when things get up and running again with people going back to work, I think work habits and thinking about workspaces will remain changed. So future design of business and public space will change. I can see how business districts, with all the big corporations and ancillary services, tightly packed together flexing their muscles with their buildings, may quickly become undesirable. It would be nice to think that health and wellbeing in design - which up until now has been mostly another cosmetic show of extravagance - could be seriously put at the centre of design leading to some intriguing architecture, urban development and use of space. But who knows. Architecture that has been genuinely full of good intentions has often failed spectacularly. I think architecture and planning can only do so much, but they are great indicators of how we think and how we live.   

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Cities and urban spaces define who we are on a multitude of levels. Residential districts bare the signs of the dwellers’ socio-economic status and interact with the broader city network expanding the inner city’s reach to suburbia and the periphery. Can you please tell us more about you series “Shut In Shut Out” and how it came to be developed?

In 2010-2016 I was living in north-west Leicestershire, a former coalfield around the town of Coalville.   After I photographed the landscape affected by the mining and the deprivation in Coalville, I looked at the contrasting up-market countryside residential properties in that part of Leicestershire.  I concentrated on the decorative, see-through, wrought-iron gates as psychological statements of success and social status in a body of work entitled “The Gates of Prosperity”.  

Then I noticed that the gates of expensive properties were changing.  The psychological statement of the gates was becoming less about success and social status and more about privacy and separation - large, blank and forbidding abstract canvases at the security-controlled entrances to sometimes almost prison-looking properties.   My gates photographs became for me a powerful visual metaphor for increasing separation of people in our society. They are a statement of the residents financial success, having assets and a way of life that needs protection and privacy; their owners not being a part of what is happening elsewhere in our society, but independent and unaffected, indeed uninfected, by it.    

I have continued making images in the outer fringes of urban conurbations, where the wealthy get more space beyond the semi-detached suburbs, but within easy reach of the city centres.  “Shut In Shut Out” is also an artist’s book using Henry Normal’s telling poem “How to make an underclass” on the phraseology of separation in society.

I hope my photographs ask the viewer to consider what is being hidden from them, deliberately made more private, in this inevitable aspect of increasing privilege and elitism that emphasises the separation of the wealthy from the realities of life experienced by the disadvantaged, struggling against the unequal, hostile environment which results from capitalism.

The high walls protecting the privacy and indeed the security of the houses you photographed, resonate metaphorically with how the lockdown has meant isolation for the majority of us. Which kind of face will we reveal once those barriers will finally come down? 

There are what I call lockdown dichotomies, as we have been learning to live in a different way, separated but online, which may lead to us to continue some of these new habits that are also more socially distanced than before.  There are positive outcomes in that there has probably been a great deal more Facetime contact and learning not to travel for meetings and work, which may stay as habits.  But our learned wariness of social contact with other people may also continue, compounded by severe distrust of our politicians by a large part of the population.

In contrast to those that have been able to stay safe at home, a large number of people have had to face considerable daily risks in keeping working away from home, and many, many people have lost dear members of their families in very distressing circumstances that have not allowed time with the dying and comfort from family and friends in their bereavements.   This will all have left permanent mental scars.

I fear that the face that we present in the future may be very related to the social trends alluded to in my “Shut In Shut Out” photographs, with narratives of difference further souring our communal presence, in this time of polarised politics.     

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London, like many other large and internationally populated cities, articulates over multiple layers. What, in your opinion, distinguishes London from other similar sized metropolis?

I’m a proud northerner who has always been fascinated and drawn to cities and I’ve enjoyed living in London for over a decade. The way we view a place is guided largely by our individual experience of how we spend our time there. As a tourist, your experience is built upon seeing the sites, often using public transport system as a great introduction. In making Whisper City Bones, I would try to harness the curiosity of a tourist by starting at  a landmark,  but then intentionally get lost on the journey, searching and hoping to discover a scene or meet someone I could photograph.

I arrived in London in 2010 having met my future wife and I was in love. In 2012 the city bathed in the exuberance of the Olympics and life felt positive and somewhat carefree.  Things have shifted since - the uncertainty of Brexit and division amongst the country has taken its toll, the atmosphere has changed, and you could feel it on the streets. This more serious and uncertain outlook has been deepened exponentially by the Coronavirus pandemic. My aim at the start of this project was to record the atmosphere of a strange and unsettling time, and I of course had no idea of how our lives would change by a lockdown.  Regardless, I have enjoyed that this project has allowed me to discover London in quiet and intimate detail, and enabled me to celebrate its people and multiculturalism.

The current pandemic has somehow revolutionised our ways of living and most likely we’ll see the city drastically changing its social and economical dynamics to respond to the upcoming recession. Do you see this as an opportunity or a threat?   

The pandemic has touched each and every person in the City. People have lost loved ones, and livelihoods are on the line.  I constantly remind myself how lucky I am that my family is well and our livelihood is relatively unscathed. With the daily safe routine of working from home with my family around me and friends online, it’s easy to forget what’s actually going on, and that large parts of society will feel the effects of this for years to come. I do hope that this gives Government an opportunity to reset priorities and focus on things that really matter, such as funding the NHS, celebrating and supporting key workers, and climate change, however I do believe that  these things may get lost as the Government agenda turns address the impending economic crisis.

Whisper City Bones was always a project that aimed to capture the day to day life in London through the lens of Brexit and the EU referendum, and although the pandemic has overtaken this, it feels like this is an ongoing project. The pandemic may feature in some form or another. The political landscape is more confusing and uncertain than ever before and I feel that this is absorbed and reflected back at us through the streets and our daily lives. There is always hope and I believe young people today see this as an opportunity to change the world for the better.  

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Suburbia is a buffer ground between the chaotic inner-cities and the quieter realities of rural areas. In Sweden like elsewhere, this is where the middle class has literally found a home in the last few decades. Your photographs reveal what’s hidden behind the rows of hedges and fences of a residential area. What are the core values of communities living in Rydebäck?

As for core values I'd say that the word family sums it up quite well. In that word I see loyalty, love, comfort, harmony and prosperity. It's very much about having a good life and having it within the walls of your house, or hedges of your garden, but also in the eyes of others.  Some citizens talk about "us in Rydebäck" as if there is some sort of common feeling of community. But most families I've met have their social connections among their closest neighbours. As long as the kids school and football training runs smoothly, very few have any bigger commitment in the community. 

Please forgive the generalisation, but from what appears from the outside, Sweden seems to be synonymous with calm, quite and ordinary  living. Did the Covid pandemic affected its equilibrium? And what, if any, are the implications on suburban  areas such as Rydebäck?  

The Covid 19 pandemic doesn't seem to have affected life in suburbia too much on the surface. People are working more from home. The store is open exclusively for senior citizens during the first hour every day (7-8) so that they can do their shopping more safely. The football club has cancelled all senior training and matches but kept the childrens training going on as recommended. And the school is open. But below that surface there’s concern about what to come. 

I had a conversation with Annika Carlsson, that I’ve met during my project, and she said:
”- What’s hard is not being able spend time with close relatives that are in a risk group and that activities we had planned has to be cancelled, like for example our parrot meetings. We can see how the birds get restless from not meeting the other parrots as they use to. What is great are all these new ideas that comes up, it’s a better focus on finding solutions and people in the community helps each other more. But I’m worried for the future. What will happen with our stores, restaurants, companies, work and so on? How do we plan to take care of the mental illness that I’m afraid will come from unemployment, loneliness, financial loss and more?” 

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Your series captures people-less city corners, as a sudden collapse of the human race left a muted void. Yet it seems that people are just temporarily hiding behind the camera, as the scent of a buzzing city is somehow still perceivable. How do you view the difference between emptiness and void?

I see them closely interrelated, 2 sides of the same coin or rather different impressions of an experience. In this series I came across them both in their physical (emptiness) and emotional (void) qualities. While out shooting and during the editing process I felt a growing sense of isolation, alienation and loneliness: the emptiness that I was observing felt like a manifestation of an emotional void I sensed around me. Like an unintentional reaction to the recent discourse and mood about politics and belonging, I started questioning my own relationship with my surroundings, the familiarity of these places and my idea of home. I felt a growing sense of isolation, alienation and distance. The images became internal landscapes where the physical emptiness in the photos is a manifestation of the emotional void around me.  

How do you think we’ll change the way we interact with city life afte the current lockdown will be lifted? 

Any guess is as good I assume. On the short term I expect many people to proceed with different degrees of caution and self-awareness. There will be an impact on many things that we used to take for granted, be it going to a restaurant, museum or just meeting with friends in a cafe for a chat. Gradually, as we adjust to the changes and we feel safer and more hopeful we are past that worst, we will try to bring back the old normal. The pessimistic in me tells me that many of us will ignore the lesson.  Ideally I would like to think that we will use this experience as an opportunity to look at different models of “normal”. Having looked at the impact the the pandemic has had at social and economic levels maybe we should re-assess things. We have seen the impact on the high streets, collapsed after several years of decline…

… We have witnessed the damage on vulnerable members of the society. We have also realised even more about the importance of having well funded and managed public infrastructure that support all of us. In the coming months and years, clapping will not be enough. Maybe we should reconsider urban life more as community-focused rather than purely ground for speculation, look at those elements that improves the quality of life and enhance interaction among different and diverse members of society. We will need a strong push, culturally and politically, a strong will to improve society at human level. 

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Your series “33” offers a playful display of amusing findings in London. Street photography surely helps us interacting with our surroundings and it gives us the freedom to interpret a place following our own instinct and cultural background. As an Italian living in London, how did photography help you in settling in and get to know your bearings? 

More than being an Italian in London, I think the fact I grew up in a country town, with very different dynamics and social relationships to those of a metropolis, was a considerable influence.I am generally a very curious person and photography is one of the tools that helps me feed this thirst. Daily London life, which develops along its streets, is an incredible nutrient for this type of voyeurism, and the camera is a congenial instrument for me to be able to capture it.

Thanks to photography I walk a lot and I observe. A walk without a goal is almost meditative; it slows down the vision and amplifies this hunger for details that sometimes, through a conjunction of absolutely undemocratic factors, is caught in the rectangle. I am attracted to residential areas where I perceive daily life, while Central London I see more as a transitional area. At this particular moment, it is interesting to note the economic centre of the city; the shopping streets, emptied of their function, have become almost surreal, anonymous areas unlike the residential ones.

After the current lockdown will be lifted and “normal” activities will resume, will you come back to find a different city? What is the first thing you will want to photograph?  

From my first day in London I have seen it as an emblem of magnetic dualism, hate and love constantly attract and reject each other; an attractive dualism that bewitches. It is a very complicated, layered fabric texture where contrasting realities coexist. It is a city that offers a lot but asks for even more.

A place where it is normal to feel very lonely, almost everyone in London lives in their own square meter, connected to their phone and headphones in complete isolation, and this is well before the famous lockdown. It will be interesting to witness the mutation of the metropolis and how it will manage to adapt to the new extremes of the restrictions. Like a boa constrictor, it will shed its skin and we will learn to understand how our new lifestyle will change spaces, urban planning, transport and consequently our social lives. Project “33” is still a work in progress; there is the curiosity and arrogance to observe and maybe to understand a vast territory that forms The Greater London perimeter, there are parts to yet walk and discover.  

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In “Ordinary Intimacy” you chose to portray, amongst other things, some unforgiving urban scapes that create a sense of abandon and decadence. Urban design and architecture determine the aesthetics of a place and could offer hints on its residents. Did you have a specific place or demographic in mind when choosing the places you photographed? 

I have a general interest in looking for contrasts, I find contradictions naturally attractive and most of the time, one way or another they become the theme of my work. These photographs were all around the contrast between the idea of what a place was designed for, what it was meant to embody and symbolise and what it’s the actual reality. Whether there was a disconnection between the architectural concept and its context, or whether the passing of time made that place obsolete, those photos were trying to represent those fractures.

The Robin Hood Gardens, a controversial social housing, where its core idea of streets in the sky surrounding a central garden has not been able to generate that envisaged social interaction, but created a concrete ghetto instead. Lots of antennas outside, so people can be locked inside. The staircase leading to the seaside built during the fascism, was meant to be a grandiose moment, the arrival to the beach, symbol of the growing economic power of the tourism; nowadays that grand-staircase is not much different than a sewage canal.

So rather than specific places or demographics, this is what I look for, incongruity and divergences. I often try to show them through irony, as a tool to highlight the immediate jarring elements, while also sparkling some criticism at a deeper level. Sometimes the irony is in the picture itself or sometimes it arises when pairing one image with a second one. The whole point is to slow down the reading process of the photos, to let the viewer occupy the space in the images, while completing what’s been left out of the frame with personal memories.

Ordinary Intimacy is a project about banal things, moments without expectations, transitory views, things you’ve seen, but you haven’t really looked at, so the fact that I have chosen to show a number of unforgiving urban-scapes is because in our everyday life there is much more of that, than breath-taking beauty.

We just don’t register it, because it is not special enough.

After several weeks of global lockdown, our perception of familiar places with be altered somehow. What do you think will be the macroscopic difference in how we live public spaces?

Beside being a photographer, I am an architect, so this question has been a central theme of discussion in these past few months! We were living a super accelerated vision of the space, everything was shared. Co-Living. Co-Working. Co-Everything. We’ve been forced into social distancing (for a good reason!) but the establishment of a temporary behavioural scheme, ENFORCED an isolated version of ourselves, while we as humans, hence social animals, need interaction. The digital one will never (hopefully!) be enough on its own.

I live in Amsterdam, and here the lockdown has been much looser than in Italy or Spain. There has been a first moment of fear and total refuse of being outside. Then what people did and keep doing is actually hanging out outdoor: in the streets, on the squares, in the parks. You are not in an enclosed, confined environment, there is fresh air, and it allows you to be at a reasonable safe distance.
I’m not saying this is right, as there is always an element of risk, but I believe that until the virus won’t be visible floating in the air (or there won't be radioactive atmosphere), people will not give up being together in the public space. It’s a matter of perceived risk unfortunately, so my view is that there won’t be much difference in our use of public space if not for the first few weeks, as we will need to readjust. Then, we’ll just be staying at a greater distance from one another, within one of these taped patterns on the ground, on the curbs, on public seating areas, which are defining safety distances.

…I do think we will expand our notion of public spaces to nature, not only parks, but the countryside, the mountains, the seaside, to avoid the crowded places in the city, but still being able to enjoy each other company.

The biggest issue in my opinion, won't be outdoor spaces, but indoor ones - especially office spaces will go through a total rethink and hopefully this will lead towards a more human, flexible and responsible working culture. 

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 What drew your attention to the Druids Heath Estate in Birmingham?

It was by complete chance that I found the Druids Heath Estate. I was on one of my first driving lessons, and my instructor took me on a different route to usual. We were driving up Bells Lane, which is the main road that runs through the estate and I remember feeling completely taken aback, fascinated by every bit of architecture. I recall seeing around 15 tower-blocks standing alone, dominating the greenscape. What seemed so ordinary was completely bewildering to me. 

Out of intrigue, when I returned home I started researching the estate. It was only then I learned that the estate hadn’t been touched since it was first built in the 1960s. No development, no investment. Nothing. Then I began reading the news headlines associated with Druids Heath and was in utter shock by how much negativity there was surrounding the area. I’d never seen anything like it before. To add to this, I found that Birmingham City Council had just announced plans for a £43m redevelopment scheme which would see a lot of the estate bulldozed, including the local school, 5/6 tower blocks, selected low-rise housing and the pub at the bottom of the estate. 

After visiting the estate on a weekly basis, my attention soon shifted to the wonderful community & all the positive work that they are doing for the people and the area.

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