When I am walking the contemporary city as a situationist exploring urban life with a film or digital camera I have a feeling of unease. The city, as both a geographic entity and as a series of criss -cross flows, is too dispersed to grasp as a unity.

I sense that the older images and concepts that we habitually represent the compact bounded city that we have come familiar with have become cliches. I start feeling naked, in spite of the camera.

The conventional distinctions centre/periphery; city/country, inside/outside no longer make much sense of the chaos as the the industrial city of yesteryear is transformed and reinvented by capitalism.

These old dualities belong to a historic discourse that we cling to like an old garment to protect us from the unease of the fragments of an industrial city fragmenting and disappearing before our eyes. The only way that I can deal with this is to grasp in images the changes that are taking place in the urban spaces that we live in--to decipher the trail they leave in space as we make our everyday journeys through these contemporary spaces.

Traces of the past in the present. To either deal…with history through the filter of the present or to focus on a present in which the past actively resonates. Either way history needs to be in the foreground.