Selected Images

A tall yellow-brick industrial chimney photographed from below at dusk, lit warmly by the last of the setting sun against a cobalt-grey sky. Two small white cellular antennas are bracketed onto the side of the chimney shaft about halfway up. The dark angular roofline of an adjacent warehouse, with a strand of bare ivy or wire silhouetted against the wall, is visible at lower-left.
An industrial chimney at dusk with two cellular antennas grafted onto it. Quintessential.

I keep an album on Flickr called Selected images. It has, at last count, 2,514 photographs in it. Roughly 250 a year for a decade, drawn from a much larger photostream. I started it as “some selected images from my stream, my particular favourites” and it stayed that, more or less. The cut runs from about 2005 to about 2015, with the bulk concentrated between 2008 and 2014.

It’s the most diagnostic photographic thing I’ve ever made, because what someone selects as their best work tells you more than what they shoot generally. And it’s also the easiest to misread. The first time someone goes through a folder of “selected favourites” they expect a portfolio. They expect the named project work, the WiFi visualisations, the data-centre film, the Touch RFID stills. Almost none of that is in here.

The 93 per cent

The most concrete fact about the album is the titles. Of a sample of 381 photographs, ninety-three per cent had no title beyond a date and a clock-time. 17 February, 17.13. 07 October, 07.34. 22 May, 07.33. The other seven per cent are mostly small numeric project codes (“London 68”, “Foo 2”, “Palmyra 6”) or one-word place names (Tate Modern, Storgata, Snøhull). There’s almost nothing in this album that’s been captioned, narrated, hashtagged, or set up to mean a particular thing.

A near-symmetrical view of a London brick council estate facade, raking late-afternoon light, three identical streetlamps lined up across the frame casting precise shadows. Bay windows with translucent net curtains are arranged in two storeys; a green-painted wooden fence runs along a basement-level area at the bottom; the pavement and a black metal handrail are visible in the foreground. There are no figures, no signs, no incident.
A London brick estate, late-afternoon. Three streetlamps, two stories of bay windows, no incident.

It’s a position. I’ve spent twenty years making things that try to make the invisible visible: radio waves, RFID, internet infrastructure, signage, pictograms. I designed a parody Oyster card called Voyeur that read “Tracking you in London” as a critique of surveillance. I’ve written that interfaces have to be visible to be ethical. The professional work is all about captions, in a strict sense.

And then, in private, I title 2,500 of my favourite photographs with nothing but a clock.

The 5 per cent

The other surprise is what’s missing. Of the 381-photo sample, only about five per cent are clearly project work, and even those are tagged with numeric codes rather than the project names. The selected cut is not a portfolio.

What it is, instead, is the daily off-cut. The photograph I made walking from the studio to the train, or from the airport to the hotel, or from the bus stop to the bedroom. The chimney with the antennas welded onto it, above, photographed because I looked up crossing a courtyard at sunset. The Manila bus shelter at three in the afternoon. The brass tap in stone in an Italian wall. Two cups of tea on a wooden table at home, steam catching the morning light, one minute before the day starts.

A shallow-depth-of-field morning still life: two ceramic teacups on a wooden table, steam rising from each cup into the shadow of the room above. The closer cup is dark blue, the further cup white, both half-filled with dark tea. Bright window light blows out the left edge of the frame; the rest of the scene is muted in cool greys and warm browns.
Tea, morning, kitchen table.

The eye that noticed an antenna welded onto a Norwegian brick chimney is the same eye that made a film about the radio shadows of WiFi routers. The off-cut and the project are continuous, one is the field, the other is the cultivated row. The selected images are the slower ground out of which the named work has grown.

What I keep coming back to

A vertical view looking up at a Barbican tower at night. The brutalist concrete-and-iron facade rises against a hazy black-grey sky, the deep balcony rails reading like comb teeth, only a few rooms lit in soft warm yellow. A railing along a walkway in the foreground reflects the city's ambient light; a stone retaining wall fills the bottom edge of the frame.
Barbican tower, London, after dark.

The ordinary stuff that’s performing as architecture. A brass tap photographed with the discipline of a portrait. An airport ticket counter treated as a building facade. A bus shelter at the same care as a chapel. Almost none of these photographs are sunsets.

A telephoto frame of a port container yard. Stacks of shipping containers fill the frame in horizontal bands of saturated colour: deep navy, red CMA CGM units, vivid green UASC units stencilled CHINA SHIPPING in white, a thin stripe of yellow industrial machinery along the bottom. A single small worker in a red hard-hat stands at the base of the stack, the only human in a wall of trade.
Container port. The single worker in the red hard-hat is at the bottom right.

The encounter between a body-scale figure and a building, or city, or industry-scale object. A lone woman in pink walking past a construction hoarding in Oslo. Two tourists tilting their heads against a Brooklyn brownstone wall. A container-port worker in a red helmet at the bottom of an enormous wall of corrugated steel. A girl with a HALF PRICE sticker on her sleeve through a café window.

A long-exposure photograph from inside a moving sled in Lapland at night, looking forward over the harnessed backs of two huskies, their dark coats spotted with frost. The trail ahead bends through dense pine forest, the trees and snowy branches lit white by a headlamp behind the photographer. The sled handle and rider's silhouette are barely visible at the head of the trail, forty metres ahead.
Lapland, sled-dogs, midnight.

Light that’s doing something quietly informative rather than performing. Almost no sunsets as spectacle, almost no Instagram golden hour. The moment when artificial light starts to appear inside windows before the sky has fully gone blue; when frost glints under a headlamp; when grey-blue dawn takes the colour out of an Italian valley; when fluorescent strip-light catches a piece of pink plastic in an industrial workshop. Internet Machine and Light Painting WiFi both apply this same level, descriptive lighting to subjects (a data centre, a wireless field) that hadn’t been treated descriptively before.

Eight cities

The geography of the album is unsentimental. Eight places dominate: London, Oslo, Italy (the Bugnara house and surrounding villages), Copenhagen, Manila, NYC and Boston, Brussels, Swedish Arvika and Katrineholm. Plus singles from Lapland, Bhutan, Kathmandu, Sri Lanka, Las Vegas, Riga, Incheon, the Mediterranean coast, and a fishing port somewhere on the Arabian Peninsula. Manila is in here for the FREE FACEBOOK billboards rather than the cathedrals. Brussels for the dog-poo-bag dispensers and the airport metro tile rather than the Grand Place. NYC for the brownstone airshafts rather than the skyline.

A close, sun-flat photograph of the white-painted bow of a wooden fishing boat. Black hand-painted Arabic script reads بيتينا and a registration number 7281ب. A black tyre fender hangs over the bow at the upper-left, throwing soft shadow. The reflection of the same script appears upside-down on the polished black surface of an adjacent vessel below.
Fishing boat hull, Arabic registration.

The eye treats unfamiliar places with the same patience it treats home with, and home with the same curiosity it brings to away. A Bugnara stone wall and a Beijing Shunyi tower-block get the same treatment.

A view from a narrow Italian alley looking up at a stormy blue-grey sky. To the left, a peeling cream-stucco wall and a small cornice from which two small lamps are suspended on an iron arm. To the right, a partially balconied Italian house with rusty wrought-iron railings, white-painted shutters, and a small turquoise window catching grey light. The composition reads as architecture-from-below as a single tall vertical breath of sky.
Italian alley, stormy afternoon, looking up.

The full set lives at flickr.com/photos/timo/albums/835678. 2,514 photographs, almost all titled with nothing but the timestamp they were taken at.