Metropole

(2014 – 2018)

Once the mother city at the heart of a vast empire, London is now the dominion to a new global power which has risen in it’s stead.

Subject to the flows of global finance and whims of markets, London has over the course of forty years shaped itself into an investment opportunity for multinational developers and overseas investors. One of the consequences of this has been spiralling unaffordability of housing, and the proliferation of ‘buy to leave’ properties, specifically marketed at international investors rather than the city’s own inhabitants. Meanwhile, truly Dickensian conditions proflierate in the new slums of the city.

Metropole records the brutally disorientating effects of this transformation of the city, by documenting these legions of new luxury blocks as they are constructed and occupied. Multiple exposure photographs are combined with appropriated, repurposed photographs taken from the billboards of the developments, alongside extensive research into the property developers behind these schemes, including their extensive use of opaque offshore financial structures and unaccountable political lobbying.

Metropole comprises:
= 150 monochrome multiple exposure photographs
= 85 colour photographs
= 67 appropriated CGI images
= approximately 100 A4 pages of research materials
= 5 minute single screen video installation.
= Book published by Overlapse Books, 2018.

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