Greys & Danger*

All Images: Central Birmingham, October 2015

I found myself over in Birmingham, the other day, for a couple of reasons, (about which - more to follow, soon).  As ever, my progress was punctuated by regular pauses to photograph miscellaneous fragments of seemingly inconsequential urban detail, (to the bafflement of various passers-by, also as ever).

One For The Fall Fans

Here are a few of the results, which, if anything, show that, my fascination with surfaces and texts, (mostly unofficial texts, in this case), continue unabated.  They also demonstrate that my eye is currently drawn to the particularly grungy and ad-hoc, or to those instances where something appears on the point of disappearance or cancellation.  Those qualities often seem to go hand in hand with a palette drained of anything much in the way of saturated colour.  It’s the scale of whites, greys, blacks and neutrals that largely colours my thinking just now.

Perhaps as an antidote to that, I also managed to collect a few more pleasing examples of black and yellow hazard warning tape.  There's always something pleasing about the Op-Art fragmentation that takes place when such striped material is wound round a cylindrical form , and I'm particularly charmed by how much effort has been made here to pad every section of scaffold that might conceivably injure an unwary pedestrian.  It's positively cuddly.

* With apologies to the late John Martyn