Hulks

Update. ‘Hulks’ is currently featured in the Architects’ Journal

London’s ‘modern’ offices are empty and starting to look like monuments to a bygone era of commuting and communal work spaces.

‘Great, empty hulks as a painful memory of capitalist overreach..’ as Michael Regnier from my agency, Panos, put it when he saw the photos.

I thought I would give them an elegiac and newly old-fashioned look, so I dug out my old enlarger neg carrier with its filed-off edges. Back in the days of film, it was designed to show the photographer’s commitment to a modernist aesthetic. The border proved the image was un-cropped, preserving the mantra of ‘truth to materials’ and demonstrating the photographer’s skill in getting the image right, in the camera.

Perhaps these empty buildings are part of a similarly outmoded, analogue, way of working. Or perhaps they will come roaring back to life.