Silent Sheffield

These images of Sheffield go together with my 2015 posts Urban landscape and Documentary images.

Why were they overlooked? The photographs are more conventionally pictorial. They don't 'say' anything. They are silent. You would hardly believe that the City of Sheffield is a bustling, thriving metropolis. There's also a sense that 'you've travelled one thousand years into the future after all human life has gone — and nothing has changed' (Photography and the uncanny).

In their muted way I find these images sad — and also disturbing.

Cracks in reality

Or this could be called 'anomalies in the Matrix'. The earliest of these was taken in 2014.

The mundane is everywhere, it surrounds us. But even ordinary things can become objects of suspicion — the suspicion that there is 'something wrong with the world'.

Building work under a bridge, a selfie caught in the reflective roof of a coffee shop, a mother dancing with her daughter, a man putting something into the boot of his car (or taking something out?), a woman walking past graffiti, an anonymous skateboarder — moments that passed unnoticed, moments without any significance. And yet, looking at these now, I have the sense that I am seeing something that was not meant to be seen...

Every picture tells a story

Scouring through my black and white negatives from the last 16 months or so I found these images, which I had neglected first time around. I am getting to understand better what moves me in a photograph. I don't want to know the whole story. There has to be something left out, left to the imagination, hinted at, half hidden and half shown.

I could tell you how I came to capture these images but the information would be irrelevant, mundane. You don't need to know. Better make up your own narrative, or just leave the unanswered questions open, and let your imagination roam.