Liverpool : 1972 – 2025 Volume 1
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Exploring Memory in ‘Whitechapel Night’
Whitechapel Night is an example of my work moving beyond straight documentary photography into something more painterly, psychological and dreamlike. I’m interested in taking an ordinary urban moment and allowing it to become something less certain; a place that exists somewhere between observation, memory and imagination.
I often return to my archive of photographs from the East End and find myself looking at places that I photographed years ago with very different eyes. Buildings have changed, streets have been redeveloped, and some of the places I remember have disappeared altogether. By reworking these photographs, I can bring those fragments of the past back into the present, but not necessarily as they really were. Instead, they become part of an imagined landscape, a kind of personal dreamscape constructed from memory.
For me, this is where the photograph begins to move away from documentary. Memory is rarely precise. It shifts, fragments and exaggerates. A familiar street can become strangely unfamiliar; colours become more intense, distances change and different moments seem to occupy the same space. I want my mixed-media work to reflect that feeling; to create images that are recognisable as places I have known, but which also feel slightly elusive, as though they belong to a half-remembered dream.
In Whitechapel Night, the photograph of the man with the cigarette is embraced by the colours of night generated by neon and sodium street lighting. Yet the image seems to exist simultaneously in day and night. The saturated oranges, reds and pinks almost overwhelm the architecture, causing Whitechapel to feel unstable, as though the street itself is melting or dissolving into colour.
Against this shifting environment, the man on the left appears reassuringly solid and purposeful. His presence anchors the image. I imagine him having just emerged from the comfort and warmth of a pub, perhaps after a few drinks, and finding himself suddenly in an alien world. He seems completely at home in his own journey, while everything around him has become strange.
That contrast is important to me. The figure belongs to the real, physical world, while the street around him increasingly belongs to memory and imagination. The shadowy figure further into the image almost becomes another version of the same experience—a fleeting presence, already dissolving into the dream.
Perhaps this is what draws me back to the East End archive. I’m not simply trying to preserve the places I photographed; I’m trying to preserve the feeling of them. By transforming the photographs, I can revisit a London that is partly real and partly remembered, allowing the past and present to exist together. Whitechapel Night therefore becomes less a record of a particular street than a portrait of how a place survives in memory—fragmented, atmospheric and constantly changing.
This work, centred on the cycle rickshaw, is a vehicle for thinking about labour, technology and environmental change. It brings together several very different visual languages: documentary photography, hand-drawn imagery, a saturated, painted landscape, and, most strikingly, the insertion of a cathode-ray tube (CRT) as the front wheel. I photographed the rickshaw in Dhaka in 2018.
The driver occupies the foreground and is physically larger than the two passengers, giving him a particularly strong presence. His upright body and direct gaze make him feel like the human engine of the image. Yet his body is also positioned as part of the machine: his legs, the pedals and the bicycle frame form an interconnected structure. The driver supplies the energy that moves the vehicle, while the passengers are transported by it. Embedded within this simple arrangement is a subtle economic and social relationship.
I want the viewer to look closely at the mechanics of the rickshaw — the wheels, chains, frame and pedals. I have deliberately disrupted our understanding of this familiar machine by replacing its conventional front wheel with something technologically and symbolically much stranger: a cathode-ray tube.
The CRT belongs to an earlier technological era: the world of televisions and computer monitors that has largely been superseded by flat screens and digital technologies. I remember seeing many of these discarded sets at the Coventry tip in the 1960s. As a boy, I would go there looking for loudspeakers, unscrewing them from dumped radios and televisions and using them to build my own speaker system at home. That memory connects the CRT in this work not only with technological obsolescence, but also with my own early fascination with taking things apart and finding new uses for them.
The image asks whether what we call technological progress is necessarily progress in human or environmental terms. There is a tension here between high technology and low technology. The rickshaw is an extraordinarily economical form of transport: it uses human energy rather than fossil fuel. The CRT, by contrast, represents an industrially manufactured form of electronic technology, dependent on complex materials, energy-intensive production and, ultimately, disposal. Bringing these two things together turns the wheel into a kind of visual metaphor for the technological economy itself.
The rickshaw has a relatively small direct carbon footprint. It relies on human muscle rather than an internal-combustion engine. The CRT wheel, however, introduces the problem of technological waste. Cathode-ray tubes contain materials that can be difficult and hazardous to dispose of, and obsolete electronic equipment contributes to the expanding problem of e-waste.
The wheel therefore becomes an environmental paradox: We have a machine powered by human energy, but its wheel is made conceptually from the technological waste of an industrial society.
The work does not simply celebrate traditional or apparently primitive technology over modern technology. Instead, it suggests that these two worlds are now inseparable. The supposedly simple rickshaw exists within the same global technological and economic system that produces the obsolete CRT.
The huge tree dominates the upper part of the composition, its branches spreading almost like veins or electrical circuits. It connects visually with the rickshaw and becomes a symbol of the inextricable relationship between humanity and nature. The tree is both organic and structural, a living network that echoes the mechanical and technological networks below it.
The driver introduces another dimension to the work. He carries the physical burden of moving the passengers. His body is visibly working, while the passengers appear relatively comfortable and passive. The image therefore draws attention to the unequal distribution of physical effort within society.
The rickshaw can consequently be understood as both a means of livelihood and a symbol of economic inequality. It represents ingenuity and relatively sustainable transport, but it also reminds us that human bodies can become a source of cheap energy within an unequal economy. The driver embodies both exploitation and resilience.
A human-powered rickshaw may appear technologically primitive, but in environmental terms it can be remarkably sophisticated. A cathode-ray tube, meanwhile, was once a symbol of technological advancement, but by the time it appears here it has become waste. Their juxtaposition suggests that technological progress is never simply a matter of replacing the old with the new. Every technology leaves material, environmental and human consequences behind.
For me, the CRT wheel is the key conceptual device in the work. It prevents the viewer from seeing the rickshaw simply as an ethnographic or documentary image. Instead, it transforms the entire vehicle into a metaphor for a world in which human labour, technological consumption and environmental consequence are caught in the same cycle.
The rickshaw moves because of the labour of the human body; the CRT wheel carries the history of industrial technology and its obsolescence; and the tree reminds us that both exist within the larger ecological system on which we depend. The image is therefore ultimately about cycles — of labour, technology, consumption, waste and renewal — and about the uneasy question of what kind of progress we are actually moving towards.
The Human Element in London’s Corporate Landscape
The glass façade dominates this image, reflecting light, geometry and wealth. Yet it isn’t the architecture that holds my attention. It’s the young man walking past the plate glass windows[. He appears self-contained, purposeful and almost anonymous, his dark silhouette briefly interrupting the perfection of the corporate landscape. For a moment, the human presence feels fragile against the scale and certainty of the buildings.
Whenever I walk through Canary Wharf, I find myself asking the same question: who is this place really for?
Everything is immaculate. The plazas are spotless, the glass gleams, and every surface seems designed to project efficiency and success. Yet I rarely feel welcome here. Even walking through one of the shopping arcades, I sometimes catch myself feeling like an intruder, as though my presence is tolerated only because I’m passing through. It is a curious sensation in what is, after all, a city I’ve spent most of my life in.
Perhaps that feeling isn’t accidental. This is architecture that choreographs behaviour. It encourages movement rather than gathering, consumption rather than conversation, circulation rather than community. There are spaces to work, to shop and to invest, but remarkably few places simply to belong. The public realm exists, yet it often feels conditional.
The irony is hard to ignore. Much of the land beneath these towers was once publicly owned before being transferred to private developers on exceptionally favourable terms. What emerged is an extraordinary concentration of wealth and power, wrapped in polished stone and mirrored glass, but one that can leave ordinary citizens feeling like guests in a place that should never have ceased to be theirs.
As I watched the young man disappear into the reflections, I couldn’t help thinking that he looked less like an inhabitant than a passing shadow—present, but never fully claimed by the space around him.
Margaret Thatcher famously declared that “there is no such thing as society.” Canary Wharf can feel like that philosophy made concrete: a landscape where markets have flourished, but where the idea of a shared civic life has become harder to find. The photograph is less about one man walking through a financial district than about the uneasy relationship between people and places that increasingly seem to value capital more than people.
Exploring Mixed Media in Street Photography
I’ve always been interested in the space where street photography meets mixed media. A photograph may begin as a record of a real moment, but I’m just as interested in what happens when I start working on it afterwards. That’s where the conversation begins—between what the camera saw and what I experienced.
This image is built from three photographs, with two of them showing the same man wearing headphones and carrying a drink. They were taken just a few seconds apart, but combining them into a single frame creates a subtle doubling, as though time has folded in on itself. Instead of one decisive moment, there are several, existing together.
The camera gives me the raw material: the perspective, the light, the textures and the everyday reality of a Liverpool street. The painterly and graphic marks are my response to that reality. They aren’t there to disguise the photograph but to reveal another layer of seeing—one that’s shaped by memory, curiosity and imagination as much as observation.
What first caught my attention wasn’t just the man himself, but the headphones. They’re everywhere now. So many people seem to move through the city wrapped inside their own private world, disconnected from the sounds, conversations and little surprises that make a place feel alive. I sometimes wonder what they’re missing.
That thought made me smile because I wasn’t always any different. Back in the 1980s I used to wander through Whitechapel Market listening to Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos on my Sony Walkman, complete with those wonderfully bright orange sponge headphones. At the time it felt magical to carry your own soundtrack wherever you went. These days it’s the opposite. If I’m out with my camera, I don’t want anything between me and the street. I want to hear the buses, the footsteps, the snippets of conversation and the unexpected moments that so often become photographs.
In this picture the man is physically present, but mentally somewhere else, absorbed in whatever he’s listening to. Between the two versions of him, a blurred passer-by cuts across the frame, reminding us that the city never pauses for anyone. Life keeps flowing around us whether we’re paying attention or not.
I’ve left most of the image in monochrome, allowing the turquoise headphones and the cool blue tones of the passer-by to remain. Those small pockets of colour became important to me. They pull the eye around the composition and add a quiet rhythm that I hope echoes the movement and energy of the street itself.
For me, this piece isn’t really about headphones at all. It’s about the different ways we experience the same place. Photography gives us the confidence that this moment really happened. The mixed-media process reminds us that every photograph is also personal—that what we notice, remember and choose to emphasise is always filtered through our own way of seeing.
Perhaps that’s why I still enjoy working this way. The photograph records the world in front of me, while the layers I add afterwards say something about the world I carry with me.
Exploring East London and Dhaka: A Comparitive Journey
Dhaka is now one of the world’s largest megacities. In the early 1990s, many of its streets still retained a relatively low-rise commercial character, although the city was already expanding at an extraordinary pace. Today those same streets are denser, noisier, and far more heavily motorised. Through all that change, the cycle rickshaw has remained one of Dhaka’s enduring symbols.
I made this photograph shortly after the fall of General Hussain Muhammad Ershad’s military government in 1990. Bangladesh returned to parliamentary democracy after the 1991 elections, and there was a palpable sense of hope that political reform might bring wider change. Yet for many people, daily life continued to be shaped by poverty and the search for work.
The barefoot, shirtless boy immediately speaks of economic hardship, but that is only part of the story. What first caught my attention was his self-assurance. His posture is upright, his stride purposeful, and he walks through the frame with a quiet confidence that seems to transcend his circumstances.
I was travelling on a cycle rickshaw when I made the photograph. Sitting slightly above the street gave me a unique perspective on the life unfolding around me. Rickshaws moved at a human pace, allowing moments to reveal themselves in a way that would have been impossible from a car. They became not just a means of transport, but a moving platform for observation.
More than thirty-five years later, I can still remember that journey through Dhaka. The city has changed beyond recognition in many ways, but this fleeting encounter has stayed with me. It reminds me that while cities evolve, the quiet dignity and resilience of the people who inhabit them are often what endure most vividly in memory.
