City on a Hill, 2022

For the past 15 years I’ve increasingly moved away from landscape work, to photographing cities, architecture and built environments along nature’s periphery. ‘City On a Hill’ is an evolution of that process.

After years of working with conventional perspective as a way to represent space, I was interested in an alternative method that was more sympathetic to the unexpected ways in which people adapted to and reconfigured these unique environments. Photographed in Italy and Morocco, they were captured with a medium format digital camera fitted with a super telephoto lens. The resultant image compresses the city’s depth into a two dimensional surface revealing the interconnectedness between its structures and the invisible actors that generated it.

There is evidence of humanity in some of the frames while others are empty – people, laundry and the occasional car hint at the internal logic of what appears to be random. However, what the participant misses when moving through these spaces, and what I sought to reveal in these images, is how the towns developed over time with purpose. Each developed organically, built up of cells over time into a larger more complex whole.

“The idea for the project came shortly after my first visit to Matera, in Southern Italy, in 2018. I had photographed the city on that first trip as a series of panoramas, taken from a series of high vantage points. They were pretty conventional – made with a standard lens which incorporated a foreground, background, and sky. In 2022 I returned to Matera with a Fuji GFX and its stellar 250mm and 1.4 Teleconvertor to play around with the compressed look of a long lens and experiment with something more ambiguous and abstract. I worked in many of the locations I had visited on the previous trip but with the tele lens and converter. The depth of field was an issue more often than not, so I took advantage of the GFX’s focus-stacking feature for those and combined 4-5 images later with Helicon Soft. To remove additional depth cues such as shadows I always worked at the beginning of tail end of the day to keep sun behind me, which had the added benefit of unifying the colour temperature of each image as I moved from location to location.

A handful of locations, such as Naples and Sicily, I had been to before while making other images. It was just a matter of going back to do some legwork for a few days, scoping out a suitable location. The remaining locations in Sicily and Morocco were researched prior to departure. I always start with Google Earth and simply wander about a potential location as if I were there in person. It’s an invaluable tool and I use it frequently but it can be deceiving, so I’ve learned to take what I see with a grain of salt and not discount a location based on what’s on the screen. Sometimes the street view images are old so the streetscapes are radically different in reality. It’s a common occurrence, so if something looks remotely good on the computer I’ll check it out in person and accept that I’ll be either disappointed with my findings or pleasantly surprised”.