Liverpool : 1972 – 2025 Volume 1
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Liverpool’s Industrial Past: A Modern Communication Paradox
In my photograph On the Phone with Headphones. Liverpool, 2021, I was drawn to the relationship between the man and the fence. I found something compelling about the way he stands behind this tall wire construction barrier, with its grid of horizontal and vertical lines cutting across the entire image. The pattern feels quite aggressive to me, dividing the photograph into small squares and almost trapping the man within it. He is there, physically present, but somehow contained by the structure around him.
What interests me just as much is the way his headphones seem to create another kind of enclosure. The fence surrounds him physically, while the headphones enclose him psychologically. He is standing in a public space, yet he seems to have withdrawn into a private world of his own. I like this contradiction. He is alone, but communicating. He is in the middle of the city, but somehow separate from it. His attention is directed towards someone we cannot see, somewhere at the other end of the conversation. For a moment, the world around him seems to have become irrelevant.
Behind him, the buildings have been demolished. I was struck by the contrast between this landscape of industrial Liverpool, with its associations of factories, warehouses, brick and machinery, and the man with his phone and headphones. The buildings belong to a physical world shaped by labour, industry and place. The man seems to belong to a different world, one in which communication is instant and distance matters much less. He can be connected to someone miles away while standing alone among the remnants of the city’s industrial past.
I think this is what I love most about the photograph. There is something almost futuristic about him, as though he’s stepped out of another time and found himself standing among the ruins of an older world. I don’t think he is necessarily aware of this contrast; he’s simply absorbed in his conversation. But, for me, the fence, the demolished buildings and his headphones come together to suggest something about the way we live now. We can be physically present in a place while our minds and attention are somewhere else entirely.
The more I look at this photograph, the more I am drawn to that tension between being enclosed and being connected. The fence keeps the man within its grid, yet his phone allows him to reach beyond it. He is surrounded by the physical remains of Liverpool’s industrial past, but connected to an invisible world that extends far beyond the frame. I find something quietly poignant in that image of a man alone in the city, both confined by his surroundings and able to escape them.
Watching Liverpool Pass By
When I first began photographing Liverpool in 1972, corrugated metal hoardings were a familiar feature of the city’s streetscape, concealing bomb-damaged sites, derelict buildings and empty plots awaiting redevelopment. Liverpool was entering a period of profound change. The decline of its traditional port and manufacturing industries was reshaping the city, while the closure of the southern docks in 1972 marked the end of an era. Amid the remnants of the past, demolition and redevelopment were becoming part of everyday life.
Nearly fifty years later, in this 2021 photograph, corrugated metal appears again, but this time it has been transformed into a canvas. A family of elongated, cartoonish creatures, with their wide eyes and curious expressions, stares out from the hoarding. In front of them stands a woman, solid and three-dimensional, caught momentarily in the street.
There is an intriguing contrast between the two. The woman is physically present but temporary; the painted figures are flat, yet they may outlast her. She will walk away, disappearing from the scene, while the characters remain on the metal until the building work moves on and the hoarding itself is removed. The photograph holds these different kinds of existence in a delicate balance: the fleeting presence of a passer-by, the temporary life of a building site, and the uncertain permanence of an image.
Perhaps there is another layer to this encounter. I find myself identifying with those wide-eyed painted creatures, watching Liverpool pass by, observing its transformations and bearing witness to the gradual disappearance of familiar places. Like them, I stand outside the action, looking on as the city continually reinvents itself. My camera, too, takes an ordinary, passing moment and gives it a kind of permanence.
The irony is that nothing in the photograph is truly permanent. The woman moves on; the hoarding will eventually vanish; even the street will change. Only the photograph remains, preserving a moment that can never be repeated.
After nearly half a century of photographing Liverpool, perhaps this is part of what keeps me looking: the knowledge that the everyday world is always slipping away, and that, occasionally, a camera allows us to hold on to a little piece of it.
Exploring Urban Duality: Dhaka Meets New York
In this mixed-media work, I bring together and juxtapose two worlds: New York and Dhaka. The woman on the right is removed from her original street environment and placed within the urban space shared with the other woman in New York. Painted graphic interventions act as a visual thread, binding the separate photographic sources into a single, unified image.
I use the blurred New York backdrop to evoke the experience of modern urban life: its speed, crowds and transience, and the difficulty of capturing any single moment with certainty.
The work collapses geographical distance. Although the two women are separated by thousands of miles and distinct cultural contexts, they inhabit the same urban space within the finished image. This creates a form of visual globalisation, in which New York’s commercial spectacle and Dhaka’s street economy become part of a shared visual experience.
The work invites us to consider what distinguishes one place from another, and what connects them: movement, labour, commerce, crowds, advertising, transportation and the fleeting encounters between strangers. The resulting image suggests an almost dreamlike vision of the city, in which different places and moments in time coexist.
Through this process, I seek to transform documentary material into a meditation on movement, labour, urban life and the connections between seemingly distant cultures. Rather than treating photographic realism as sacrosanct, I use it as a point of departure, allowing the creative process to reshape, reinterpret and ultimately transcend the original sources.
Exploring the Beauty of Glass in Photography
There’s something about glass that has always caught my eye. I can walk past an ordinary window, bottle, ornament or piece of discarded glass and suddenly find myself looking at it differently — wondering what the light is doing, what is being reflected, and how the scene might change through the lens of my camera.
I’ve always been fascinated by glass, not only as an ancient material but as something that seems to have a life of its own when photographed. Humans have been making glass for thousands of years. The earliest known glass objects were made in Mesopotamia and Egypt around 3500 BCE, initially taking the form of beads, jewellery and decorative objects. Over the centuries, glassmaking evolved, and by the time of the Industrial Revolution, new manufacturing methods allowed glass to be produced on a much larger scale.
Today, glass is everywhere. We look through it, look into it, walk past it and often barely notice it. But for a photographer, it can transform the ordinary into something much more intriguing.
What attracts me most is the way glass interacts with light. Reflections, refractions, shadows, highlights and imperfections can all produce unexpected results. A pane of glass can mirror one scene while revealing another behind it; curved glass can stretch, compress or completely distort a familiar subject; textured and coloured glass can turn light into abstract shapes and patterns. Even scratches, bubbles, ripples and fingerprints can become part of the image.
Glass also introduces an element of surprise. You can never be quite sure how the camera will interpret what you’re seeing. Move a fraction, change the angle, or wait for the light to shift, and an entirely different image can emerge. For a photographer looking for unusual images, glass provides endless opportunities to discover the strange, the abstract and the unexpected in everyday surroundings.
Here are some of the images involving glass that have caught the attention of my camera.
Remembering the Battle of Cable Street: A 90-Year Legacy
Ninety years ago today, the streets of London’s East End became the scene of one of the most remarkable acts of resistance in British history.
On 4 October 1936, Sir Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts planned to march through the heart of the East End, with around 3,000 fascists setting out from Tower Hill towards Whitechapel. For the largely Jewish community living there, the march was an unmistakable provocation.
The government refused to stop it.
So the people of the East End did.
Tens of thousands poured into the streets around Cable Street and Gardiner’s Corner. Local residents, Jewish communities, trade unionists, communists, socialists and others opposed to fascism joined together to block the route. Barricades went up. The police struggled to clear a way through the crowds. In one of the enduring images of the day, a tram driver abandoned his tram in the middle of the road, helping to bring the traffic — and the march — to a standstill.
Eventually, the police diverted Mosley’s march away from the East End. The Blackshirts never reached their intended destination.
Among those who stood there that day was Max Levitas.
I was fortunate enough to meet Max many years later when we interviewed him for our film, From Cable Street to Brick Lane. He spoke with extraordinary clarity and warmth about the events of 1936, but Cable Street was not simply a story from his past. Max spent his long life campaigning for peace, social justice and equality.
Listening to him, the distance between 1936 and the present seemed to disappear. The history was no longer something written in books or remembered in black-and-white photographs. It was there in Max’s voice, in his memories, and in the person sitting in front of the camera.
The photographs in this post bring together different moments in that continuing story.
There are photographs of Max himself, whose life connected us directly to the events of 1936. There are photographs I took at the 50th-anniversary march and celebration at Stepney Green in 1986 — 40 years ago now. And there are photographs from more recent Cable Street events, showing how the memory of that extraordinary day has continued to be carried forward by successive generations.
Looking at those older photographs again, I’m struck by the faces. People who came together to remember something they had experienced, or inherited as part of the history of their families and their community. Some of those faces are now themselves part of history.
And then there are the streets.
Cable Street, Whitechapel, Stepney Green, Brick Lane — places that have changed and changed again, while still carrying traces of the communities that made their history. Walking through them with a camera has always felt like moving between different layers of time.
That is what From Cable Street to Brick Lane was about for me: not simply recording a historical event, but listening to the voices and photographing the people and places through which that history continues to live.
Ninety years on, Cable Street remains more than a story about a march that was stopped.
It is a story about ordinary people filling the streets, standing together, and refusing to let their neighbourhood be used as a stage for hatred.
These photographs are some of the fragments of that story that I have been lucky enough to witness and preserve.
