Inkblots, 2002

A Zimbabwean road at sunset photographed through the windscreen of a moving car. Ahead, a battered minibus throws dust into golden light; the African sun sits low on the horizon, two pedestrians silhouetted at the dirt verge. The dashboard and a single rear-view mirror frame the lower edge of the photograph.
5.19pm Travelling from Mutare to Harare, Zimbabwe

Inkblots was a series of twenty-six photographs I selected in May 2002 from a database of around thirty thousand. I’d been making them with a small silent digital camera over the previous two or three years. The artist’s statement I wrote at the time:

As a filmmaker, used to working with images changing 25 frames every second, I have been using digital photography as a narrative medium — taking sequences of photographs to suggest movement, place, stories, journeys and discovery. Selecting 26 of these images from a database of over 30,000 has been a difficult task. The purpose of this exploration has been simple — a personal, visual diary that records daily life. It is enabled by this tiny, silent digital camera that follows my every move. I never use the viewfinder — the screen allows for photographic framing and composition so that the camera rarely gets in the way of the experience. In amongst the thousands of blurred people, pavements, traffic and skies are moments when the sun highlights features in a hallway, or where evidence of human endeavour meets a rugged landscape. It is this that excites me — that compelling images may emerge from a tortuous 48 hour bus ride in Argentina, a lazy afternoon in Zimbabwe or from a Sunday walk in the suburbs of Oslo. Timo Arnall, May 2002.

The Argentine bus ride is Buenos Aires to Mendoza. The Sunday walk in the suburbs of Oslo is photograph 24 below. The lazy afternoon in Zimbabwe is the road between Mutare and Harare with the minibus in front of us, above.

The 26 photographs

The interior of Stansted Airport at dawn: Norman Foster's white tetrahedral roof structure receding into mist, an empty rail platform below, low yellow lights along the floor.
6.49am Stansted Airport, London
A Tottenham apartment block at night, lit windows arranged in a grid against a sodium-orange cloudy sky. Bare branches of a tree intrude from the right of the frame; the street below recedes into distance with a few small sodium lamp-points on the left.
8.16pm Tottenham, London
A Zimbabwean road at sunset, a battered minibus ahead throwing golden dust, two pedestrians silhouetted at the verge.
5.19pm Travelling from Mutare to Harare, Zimbabwe
Looking out through a Helsinki window at a hooded figure in a translucent rain poncho leaning over the parapet, a small bronze equestrian statue and pale-yellow Helsinki buildings dissolved in heavy fog beyond, the dark window frame at left and right.
3.50pm Helsinki, Finland
A late-night Helsinki bar interior, ochre walls under cool fluorescent strip lights, three patrons seated around a small table with beer bottles, two framed pictures on the wall, a fourth diner half-cropped in shadow at the right edge.
11.35pm Helsinki, Finland
A red leather suitcase resting on a wooden public bench in slanted late-afternoon sunlight, the long shadow of the bench falling across the cobbled pavement. The legs of two pedestrians are visible mid-stride at the top of the frame.
6.06pm Angel, London
A child in dark blue clothing crouched on a metal grating walkway, head down, looking through the grid at whatever lies beneath. The grating fills almost the whole frame as a strict orthogonal lattice.
3.04pm South Bank, London
An aircraft wing photographed through a passenger window: the wing-tip with its small orange winglet against a calm grey sea below, the engine cowling visible at the right edge.
7.39am Travelling from London to Dublin
A side-street corner in Wexford, Ireland: a Campbell's-Soup-pastiche poster reading 'Tomato Exit' painted onto a doorway in a stone wall. Beyond the corner, a lone figure walks down a sunlit side-street between brick and limewashed buildings.
6.38pm Wexford, Ireland
A small Wicklow village street at deep blue twilight: a low whitewashed cottage on the left, a 'Murphy's Sport Pub' lit sign visible further along, sodium lamps casting warm pools of light onto wet asphalt and yellow road markings.
8.41pm Wicklow, Ireland
A wide pedestrian crossing on an empty Espoo street in raking late-afternoon sun, the painted white stripes casting long shadows on grey asphalt. The geometry fills almost the whole frame.
5.19pm Espoo, Finland
A long Stansted terminal corridor in silhouette: a queue of travellers with rolling suitcases and bags moving toward an exit, lit only by a bright window strip running along the wall behind them.
12.03pm Stansted Airport, London
Inside a Buenos Aires train carriage: a service door painted in heavy yellow-and-black diagonal hazard stripes, almost filling the frame. A passenger's silhouetted head and shoulder dominate the right side; another passenger is faintly visible through the door's small window.
11.57am Buenos Aires, Argentina
A wall in a small Buenos Aires interior: old ivory wallpaper, a small mantelpiece clock, four framed pictures hung at slightly off-kilter heights, a vase of pale flowers and potted plants on a small table below.
10.10am Buenos Aires, Argentina
An empty Buenos Aires bus terminal at dusk: yellow-and-grey diagonal floor tiles, a red Coca-Cola fridge, sodium lights overhead, signage receding into the back of the hall.
7.14pm Buenos Aires, Argentina
A pale-turquoise swimming pool fed from a rocky desert hillside near Mendoza, a single white plastic chair half-submerged at the edge, brick paving and scrubland beyond.
3.08pm Near Mendoza, Argentina
The Andean foothills photographed through a bus window in late golden light. The sun flares in the upper-left corner; mist softens the mountains; the road runs as an unseen line beneath the image.
8.01pm Travelling from Puente del Inca, Argentina to Santiago, Chile
A motel room in Caldera, Chile, at dusk: a small CRT television to the right showing a black-and-white film scene of two figures embracing, and a window to the left showing a streetlamp glowing orange against a deep blue evening sky.
8.39pm Bahía Inglesa, Caldera, Chile
A row of identical pastel-painted two-storey beach houses lined up on a sandy plain in Bahía Inglesa under a cloudless deep-blue Pacific sky.
2.31pm Bahía Inglesa, Caldera, Chile
A stone-walled boardwalk at dusk in Bahía Inglesa: rusted-orange sodium light pooling on the sand in the foreground, the dark headlands and empty beach beyond, a small line of seafront streetlamps, deep blue clouds above.
8.44pm Bahía Inglesa, Caldera, Chile
A bright modernist concrete corridor in Calama, looking through a doorway onto a flight of stairs ascending behind tubular-steel railings. The walls are white, the floor grey-blue tile, the space almost entirely empty.
12.37pm Calama, Chile
A bedroom interior in San Pedro de Atacama: a heavy cream woven bedspread, soft thin curtains catching daylight at a window with a wooden frame, a small bright slice of sky and stone visible beyond.
4.50pm San Pedro de Atacama, Chile
A roadside rest stop on the Andean altiplano between San Pedro and Jujuy: two metal poles framing a flat brown plain, distant blue mountain ranges, scattered cumulus cloud, a concrete-edged road in the foreground. Brilliant midday light.
4.04pm Travelling from San Pedro de Atacama, Chile to Jujuy, Argentina
A concrete underpass at deep blue twilight, a strip of fluorescent light running along its eaves, a single curved lamppost on the right with a bright sodium head against a darkening sky.
6.57pm Oslo, Norway
A loft-converted café in Helsinki, golden afternoon light pouring in from tall industrial windows on the right, a large vintage Pierre Brasseur film poster on the left wall, a small lamp on the bar in the foreground, a lone bowler-hatted figure seated at a table at the far right.
3.34pm Helsinki, Finland
An Oslo apartment hallway at dusk: a wedge of warm sunlight cutting diagonally across a yellow-cream wall from an off-frame window, a thin white door panel propped vertically against the wall, the brick fronting of a building across the street visible through the doorway.
5.47pm Oslo, Norway

The working method I described in 2002 is more or less the one I still use. Camera at chest height, screen as the frame, timestamp-and-place caption, the willingness to keep thirty thousand photographs and choose twenty-six.