CANDID CITY

Sometime during lockdown I got lost down a very peculiar public rabbit hole - Google Earth.

For no good reason I was looking for evidence of the technology used to take the photographs that make up this astounding algorithmic atlas.

I wanted to see the actual camera in reflections of the shops and car windows. This was not to be.

What I found, repeatedly, was the crisp proud shadow of Google’s car-mounted camera and tripod.

For too many days I explored my city virtually; scrubbing past locations that were overcast and obsessing over those where the sun was strong. The following pages show examples of this from in and around St. Pauls, Bristol.

This random search soon refined itself into a rule set that returned numerous beautifully honest cityscape snap-shots.

I soon moved on from always including the camera shadow to shots that displayed a naive and candid expression of city life, although the shadows of bollards and people remained.

Despite their unintended ‘natural’ beauty I still had to work on the raw images to divine compositions worthy of sharing.