“There is a lot more to these pictures than a novel reading of [London's] streets. The pictures originate as 35mm transparencies, part-developed and then solarised before being re-developed for another five minutes or so. From inter-negatives contact prints are made onto pre-coated aluminium sheets… What emerges isn’t a perfectly realized image but one that is marked by the demands of the process, by fingerprints, droplets and blisters. The picture itself, that is to say, carries as one of its aspects evidence of its making, the accidents and incidents involved in bringing the image to the light of day…
The pictures also have to be ‘made out’, fathomed or figured. Stains and blurs ask to be identified or separated one from the other; and due to the unfamiliar tonal range of the images items such as bolt-heads and lights have to be discerned. There are pieces of texts, as well, which can almost be read, and they cause hesitation and strain… Thus the city with its frameworks and modules provides a setting and a foil for the kind of almost imperceptible moments in which we usually have our being.”
Ian Jeffries