Urban Traces on the Slopes

This photographic series was taken in Sheffield, England, a city once world-renowned for its steel industry. Sheffield was the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution and still serves as a commercial and manufacturing epicenter for the country, not least in the field of metalworking, as its production of stainless steel has simply been peerless. It had previously been known as the Steel City and had established itself as an industrial capital of the world. Yet in the last quarter of the century, industrial production commenced to migrate elsewhere in the world, especially to regions where costs were less. With the disappearance of factories and the decline of industry, the city underwent drastic economic as well as spatial changes. This series highlights a part of Sheffield that very rarely features in tourist photographs or civic boosterism. These are the alleys and aged buildings dotted through the hilly terrain of the city. Many of these edifices look empty or deserted. Their walls are pocked with cracks, their windows shattered, and every surface is a canvas for graffiti. These signs are messy, but they speak an urban language from the margins. They are signs of resistance, of speech, of being, scored into disused places. I will be photographing with ultra wide angle lenses, and tilt-shift perspectives, not for their humorous effects but rather to keep the sense of physical imbalance derived from the land in the pictures. Differences in texture of wall and pavement are brought out by natural light at dawn and dusk as quickly as one notices how time has adhered on the environment. Every frame captures not just architectural decay but a place caught between the use of the past and the detachment of the future. Through this work, I wonder: How are we to sense what remains of a city’s industrial history when it is no longer venerated or preserved? The wreaked inclines of Sheffield present a visual and emotional chronicle of a place still disputing itself.