HAND CAR WASH, DANTZIC STREET. 7.20am This morning the sky was clear. A pure blue emerged from this grey night, and the dawn seemed to hurry quickly through, so that it was light enough for the street lamps to go off a full fifteen minutes earlier than the clouded yesterday. A sharp cold caused cars to be frosted over. Dantzic Street runs from Collyhurst Road into the city centre, where at its end the glowing, new Co-op Bank building rests, […]
Manchester is unfairly famed for its rain. If it’s raining in Manchester, then somewhere else along the west of Britain is also getting it, and I’d rather this new, soft water than drought and lime. It’s not easy to photograph in though. The camera drips miserably and the lens needs constant attention. This morning my hood was up and my chilled hands were thrust deep into dampened pockets. A bin lorry, or waste re-cycling vehicle, as it’s now known, pulled […]
I only have around 35 minutes to work in each morning, before the light lifts and the street lights go off. People who are on their way to work in this transient half light have tense faces. They resist eye contact, shoulders are hunched, there are no smiles. There’s a sense of isolation. Great Ancoats Street and Swan Street sometimes feel to me as if they are a tarmac moat, between the city centre and the network of untidy streets […]
LUDGATE STREET, Manchester, 7.06am I work in a simple fashion. Just a digital camera, one short zoom and a tripod. I shoot more with a Colt 45, face to face, than as a sniper with all his telescopic sites, and so it’s easy to set up once I notice something. The morning was cold, not much love in the sky. I could tell that it promised nothing more than a solid grey.This car had pulled up opposite a waiting taxi, […]
Foundry Lane was mostly an empty street at 7.15 am. I walked past a pair of black Pierre Cardin boxer shorts on the way to taking this picture. They lay neatly on the pavement, next to a pizza box, as if someone had just stepped out of them. The red brick houses to the left of the picture are the Smithfield Gardens housing estate, built in the 1970s, and the first modern residential development in the Northern Quarter. There’s a […]