Close to Home

Hove, UK

I’ve been reading some of Jim Roche’s posts on Substack lately, particularly one about John Gossage’s The Pond and another on The Absent Hand by Suzannah Lessard. These have inspired me to photograph closer to home, rather than awaiting opportunities to photograph farther afield.

On the corner of my street lies this seemingly abandoned building. There have been broken down cars lying in its forecourt, for a while there was a large tip (dumpster) on the street outside and all sorts of dilapidated furniture and old rubbish made its way out. For a long time the door hung open and one would occasionally be aware of people there, but for the last few months the door has been shut and some windows boarded up. There is a seemingly abandoned car sitting on the forecourt, it’s front windows open, its rear left tyre flat. No one comes or goes. It is surrounded on two sides by an overgrown garden.

to be continued…

Upper Illium?

Upper Hale, Surrey, UK

We walked up to the Upper Hale (one of Farnham’s villages) to see how they’d integrated the dilapidated chapel into the landscaping design of the cemetery (the work in this article has been completed.) Emerging into the Upper Hale we saw this house with its equine wooden sculpture (we didn’t check inside for Greek soldiers).

Leaving Galway

We spent the first two weeks of August, traveling around Ireland. We started in Galway and proceeded more or less counter-clockwise, including time in Ulster, then Donegal, before traversing the island to Dublin and our flight home. I shot over 1000 frames, so expect to see lots of verdant landscapes, castles and other postcard-genre, tourist shots over the coming days and weeks.

The tour was designed for photographers and their non-photographer partners and I was expecting to travel around in a small coach. In fact we were in one of those gigantic modern buses. The first couple of days in Galway town were quite rainy but then we got on the bus and left. Here are a few snaps through the window of the bus before we made our first stop.