About

Originally from the industrial northeast of England, I’m a photographer and live event producer based in Venice Beach, California. My work focuses on how abstract social structures — e.g. security, education, government itself — are manifested, through a kind of secular immanence, in the physical structures that represent them. Communication systems are exemplified by silent, or unanswered, telephones; citizenship by empty seats facing the flag; the welfare state by an architecture that says, “the state is stronger than you, and will never cease.”

Just as we confront these ideological structures individually, so the physical structures that embody them confront each of us singly. As Louis Althusser argued, “all ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects.”

These ideological structures exist everywhere, just beyond our perception, inspiring a kind of paranoia I’ve tried to capture in my work. My work is architectural/psychogeographic, informed by Roland Barthes’ theoretical work, and the photography of Bernd & Hilla Becher, Candida Höfer, and August Sander.