Half Mile

Photographs by Tim Diggles

PCNS GalleryBurslem School of Art

January 20th to March 20th 2015

Tim DigglesContact: timdiggles@gmail.comBlog: timdiggles.wordpress.com

Framed prints 16 x 12 inches, 12 x 12 inches or A4 are £125 each plus deliveryLarger or smaller prints framed or unframed are available please contact me for a quote

Half Mile brings together a small selection of photographs from projects I have been working on over the past two years. The photographs are taken within the confines of my one-bedroomed flat and a half a mile radius of my flat in Tunstall, Stoke-on-Trent, a densely built town where Victorian terraced houses meet factories meet twentieth century housing meet new builds meet shops meet back alleys meet small businesses meet urban decay meet overgrown landscapes meet factories meet new roads meet the edge of country meet lanes meet town. It is an area of overlaid time periods, mending, making-do, passions, jerry-building, words, light and shapes. Humans have attempted to take control of the environment and the people’s lives who exist there; the carelessness of those people allows the elements and nature to begin to recapture that environment.

A return walk within half a mile of my flat is roughly the limit to my physical abilities, this necessity has condensed my experience, the limitations allow an intensity of involvement, of seeing, of exploring the missed object, place, corner, colour.

Half Mile includes photographs from the following Projects:

Flat LifeFlat Life is a completed series of 200 photographs, exploring the compositional possibilities of light and form within my one-bedroomed flat at different times of day and night, it captures the fleeting timeless view from out of the corner of my view, the everyday, emptiness, silence, the interaction of my choice of positioning with the way dust and light falls, loneliness, the unplanned footprint of my interval in a space. I’m searching for what isn’t seen because it is what is seen all the time, is of no consequence, of no interest. When we go on holiday we see so much that is new it is impossible to capture it – when we enter our own space we see so much that it becomes invisible. Flat Life owes its origins to the independent film makers (and my own work) of the early 1970’s which placed a camera in front of the everyday and allowed things to enter or leave the frame over a fixed time span.

Tim DigglesPCNS Gallery, Burslem School of ArtJanuary 20th until March 20th 2015

Half Mile

StreetsStreets is a project in which I am photographing all 122 streets, roads and lanes within a half-mile radius of where I live. My interest lies not in those who live there but in what those people have done to their environment, the attempts to be individual, to show a front, to adapt what has been left by others. Walking along roads which are usually rushed along unseen has been the most interesting, finding the places of interaction between the traveller and the static, the place where older paths are cut through and replaced by new. Where nature has retaken the battleground.

I am about a quarter way through this Project which derives from my love and need for maps and time, placing myself in a space and knowing where I am whether physically or mentally. Living without knowing my position place location time is impossible for me. This work has coldness distance and is deliberately analytical unromantic spiritual-less. Or maybe not.

My work is not commenting or judging, there is no statement being made or position taken. I am attempting to show what I am seeing, noticing, glancing, the combinations of light, colour, form creating compositions where the content matters little. I do not look for beauty I look for form light shape as I see them. If you want to know what the place looks like buy a postcard, log onto Street View - what you see in these photographs is how I see and I have the conceit to exhibit this.

Photography is one medium for my work as much as writing, drawing, film-making. I began taking photographs at art school in 1970 and digital photography has helped me greatly. I always disliked the ‘chemistry’ of photography, my interest is in the image not the process. The need for special facilities has been eliminated. The elements of ‘chance’ have been lessened, we can now see the exposure, colour (or black and white which we never saw images in until reaching the darkroom) on a camera screen in real time. This I like.

Most of these photographs were taken using a Canon EOS-M camera, mainly with the standard 18-55 lens. All the photographs have been worked on in Adobe Lightroom.