SW6 is a photography project about my immediate neighbourhood in South West London. The project consists of over sixty images edited from over 1000 negatives. These were taken from a single location over the 2 years in which I occupied the space. All images are shot on 35mm colour film and processed by local photo lab, which can be seen from my window.
The aim is to make work that reveals unexpected insights and random juxtapositions influenced by the surrealist street photographers of the early 20th century. Here, in contrast to the work of this era, I assume the role of the ‘mental traveller’ avoiding the hostility of the modern city and physical perambulations of the street photographer.
In addition to describing urban space and suggesting the interior point of view, SW6 references the medium itself - photography’s fragmentary nature, peripheral views and fleeting observations in an attempt to illuminate the innate rhythms of city life.
‘My room is situated on the forty-fifth degree of latitude… it stretches from east to west; it forms a long rectangle, thirty-six paces in circumference if you hug the wall. My journey will, however, measure much more than this, as I will be crossing it frequently lengthwise, or else diagonally, without any rule or method. I will even follow a zigzag path, and I will trace out every possible geometrical trajectory if need be.
Xavier De Maistre, A Journey Around My Room. 1790
‘Cities unlike villages and small towns are plastic by nature. We mould them in our images: they, in turn, shape us by the resistance they offer when we try to impose our own personal form on them. In this sense, it seems to me that living in cities is an art, and we need the vocabulary of art, of style, to describe the peculiar relationship between man and material that exists in the continual creative play of urban living. The city as we imagine it, the soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, and nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture.’ (Raban, 2008)
Jonathan Raban, Soft City