Roman Road: A Fusion of Memory and Modernity

This photomontage combines two images: a photograph of Roman Road, London, taken in 2009, and a photograph of a woman using her phone in the East End, taken in 2025. Photography, drawing, and digital manipulation are fused into a single psychological image.

I wanted to create a work that feels simultaneously documentary and dreamlike, where the city becomes a layered field of perception, memory, and social interaction. The original photograph of a busy market day on Roman Road has been inverted, transforming day into night, while the woman on her phone appears suspended above the street in daylight. This juxtaposition reflects my experience of walking through the East End distracted by thoughts, memories, advertisements, lights, and passing strangers, recalling journeys home after visits to a local pub in Whitechapel.

The woman on her phone embodies a familiar contemporary condition: being physically present in public while mentally elsewhere. The work attempts to construct a mental landscape in which observation, distraction, technology, memory, and anonymous human encounters overlap and coexist. Like the floating figure, neon-like scribbles, glowing outlines, and gestural marks drift across the scene, disrupting any straightforward photographic reading.

The image occupies a space between documentation and imagination. It can be understood as a photograph of a dream.