Trading Zones, St. Helier Old Police Station
19 – 29 September 2018

Trading Zones draws on work produced during my six months as the 2018 Archisle photographer in residence at the Société Jersiaise, time I have spent looking at the islands finance industry. Located in Royal Square’s Old Police Station, itself a former bank and later the location of the Jersey Police Financial Investigations Unit, the exhibition is a multi-method survey of Jersey’s most successful contemporary industry.

Using a wide range of photographic approaches, Trading Zones considers different aspects of finance, from its history and geography to its architecture and visual culture. Alongside this the exhibition reflects on the industry’s complex relationship with the island that supports it, highlighting aspects of Jersey’s past and present which have been conducive to the growth of finance, and inviting Jersey people to contribute their own thoughts about the industry and what in means to them as part of an evolving display.

Metropole

A composite of dozens of walks through the city of London, using it’s changing architecture as metaphor for the city’s growing inequalities.

Published by Overlapse 2018, designed by Tom Mrazauskas. Soft cover, swiss bound, 20 x 28cm, 160 pages on various papers, 12 inserts.

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Organisation
(ongoing)

For the cultural critic Walter Benjamin, the early shopping arcades of Paris were the defining buildings of the nineteenth century, spaces where the technologies, mores, and concerns of the time coalesced within a single structure of iron and glass. If one were to look for a comparable space to represent the late twentieth and early twenty first century, a strong candidate would be the international airport.

These are the spaces that most of us seek to spend as little time in as possible, and to spend that time as distracted as possible from the environment that surrounds us. And yet this space is one where so many of the defining features of our time unite under one roof, from global trade and mass migration, to environmental challenges to security concerns, the modern airport represents the complex, vulnerable, interconnectedness of the modern world.

Trading Zones
(2018 –  Present)

Trading Zones is an ongoing project on international financial flows, with a particular focus on ‘offshore’ finance. While this topic has been photographed before, Trading Zones departs from the tendency to view tax havens in isolation, instead seeing the ‘offshore’ as something which is only possible because of a corresponding ‘onshore’ which permits and facilities these activities.

In the case of Trading Zones the relationship between onshore and offshore is crystalised in the relationship between the City of London, a medieval vestige turned financial hub in the heart of the Greater London, and the Bailiwick of Jersey, a semi-autonomous crown dependency turned financial hub in the English Channel, and where I was artist in residence for six months.

Trading Zones employs a multi-method approach to offshore finance, engaging with different aspects of it through a constellation of techniques including conventional and experimental photography, appropriated and manipulated imagery, architectural surveying, data visualisations, schematic diagrams, opinion polling, and interviews.

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Exploring the dark origins and moral grey zones of space exploration through the life of V-2 rocket designer turned NASA engineer Wernher von Braun.

20×25 cm, 250 pages
Hardback case binding
Edition of 800
Published by Disphotic Editions, 2023
ISBN 978-1-7392695-0-0

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Depravity’s Rainbow
(2018 – 2022)

Wernher von Braun was a man with star dust in his eyes, and blood on his hands. In his last thirty years he was an American citizen who built rockets for NASA, machines which landed men on the moon in 1969. But in his first thirty years he was a German citizen, who wore an SS uniform and built ballistic missiles for the military of Nazi Germany, machines which killed thousands of civilians between 1944 and 1945.

Depravity’s Rainbow uses this improbable life story as a way to explore the equally contradictory history of space exploration, and the way that militaristic and expansionist aims have often been dressed in a cloak of peaceful civilian science. Pre-war and post-war lives are juxtaposed in a narrative arc shaped like the parabola of a ballistic missile, and through this the problematic histories, moral ambiguities, and Faustian pacts of von Braun’s life, and of space exploration in general, are laid bare.

I draw on a mixture of photographs made during visits to key rocket development sites across Europe, many of them today largely forgotten. Alongside these images I assemble further photographs, documents and other materials from a variety of government and scientific archives. These pieces are then printed as cyanotypes, the earliest form of photography and originally intended for astronomical photography, the cyanotype process was used throughout the 20th century to produce engineering and architectural blueprints. Latent within the cyanotype’s chemistry are also the components of hydrogen cyanide, the gas used in the systematic extermination of at least one million people during the holocaust.

Project comprises: 121 blue cyanotype prints, 245 brown toned cyanotype prints, 72 colour photographs of original documents, approximately 300 A4 pages of research materials, 20 minute video installation.

Book published by Disphotic Editions, 2023.

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Shadows of the State dummy book Tracking and mapping the covert radio stations used by intelligence agencies to communicate with their agents in the field. Includes 24 barcodes which open recordings of the stations when scanned. Dummy book 2017. Soft cover, Swiss bound, 30 x 22cm, 192 pages colour on matt paper. More information about Shadows of the State. Order a copy of Shadows of the State.    

Power to the Edge (2016 – ?)

Power to the Edge is about long predicted but increasingly realised forms of networked warfare.

City of Dust

Relating walking and memory to explore the history of London. A publication which pulls apart to form an exhibition.

2016. 29 x 38cm, 28 pages black and white on newsprint.

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Shadows of the State

Tracking and mapping the covert radio stations used by intelligence agencies to communicate with their agents in the field. Includes 24 barcodes which open recordings of the stations when scanned.

Published 2018 by Brave Books, designed by Tom Mrazauskas. Hard cover, case bound, 30 x 22cm, 192 pages on uncoated paper.

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