After spending a relatively short period of time living in Brentford, England, I noticed that the town’s ongoing renaissance was clearly not its first. I wanted to capture that period of development and contrast it with indications of similar periods in the past. How do they start and, sometimes, stall? I approached this project as an outsider. I had observed this west London town day to day for two years, long enough to see it closely but not so long that I felt any affinity towards a particular era.

The question for me was how to convey all of this photographically. To that tend I chose to capture Brentford of the past century suing a camera that is nearly half a century old, a Polaroid Land Camera 440. Each photo taken provides a strip of chemically-infused paper, which creates a traditional positive image and simultaneously an often-imperfect negative. The positive image gives the instant gratification; however, it is that flawed negative that fascinates me as a photographer. Scans of those negatives unearth new life in the images that create an organic mood rather than a pixel-perfect representation of the scene. This method is probably one of the more tedious ways to attempt project of this nature, but I honestly couldn’t imagine doing it any other way.

This project (which was also a limited run book) was not meant to be a complete history or even an in-depth look at Brentford, just a moment in time. I hope you enjoy it.

June 2017