The Appearance of Things

For many years, Paul has focused on the material cultures of urban spaces. In 2013 with Rachel Jones, he co-organised ‘Visual Urbanism: Perceptions of the Material Landscape’ conference held at the British Library focusing on the theme of urban materialities, and this opened up an number of debates around the relationships between objecthood, use, commodification, abandonment and the archaeologies of ‘thingness’. He says:

“It's a hugely important area of photographic theory that is more often than not missing from photography education, not least because of the obsession in the field with semiotics, identity and the politics of representation. And yet, here we are, surrounded by stuff. We walk on it, wear it, sit on it, touch it with our hands, but how often will you see a meaningful discussion focusing on the archaeologies of urban material culture? So, in 2007, I thought it might be useful to integrate my studies in the archaeology of landscapes with a photographic project that gave me an excuse to photograph objects and architectural surfaces with a twin-lens reflex camera that was very different from working with the 35m rangefinder I had grown so used to walking the streets with.”

When he was working on a research dissertation at Cambridge on refugee objects brought to the UK by asylum seekers escaping conflict zones, it became increasingly apparent that there was considerable disagreement within and between the ‘traditionalists’ that think of and frame archaeology as ‘science’, and those working at the intersections of so-called ‘ethnoarchaeology’. Although Paul trained within science-based archaeology, he was more interested in how such a discipline might be applied to photographic art practices; and so he set out to make a set of images with the discipline and focus of a field archaeologist – but without the ‘science’. “in its place, I wanted to create a space of narrative, where the viewer might think about, and construct their own personal and collective stories about things.’

This project was completed in 2019, and Paul gave a number of workshops for the Royal Photographic Society (RPS), various universities and the British Library, relating to the project as it was in development, and how cultural archaeology research might be applied to everyday objects and things that are commonplace, yet so often overlooked.

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Some Sort of Silence

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Gates of Eden