Benign Surveillance 1

All Images: Central Birmingham, January 2018

I suppose it's only realistic to accept that some might find something questionable in my current habit of pointing of my lens through urban windows - to photograph the occupants within, without their knowledge or consent.  Certainly, such activities could raise a variety of potentially problematic issues regarding personal privacy, in our current surveillance-obsessed society - if viewed with cynicism.
   

In so far as I've analysed my own ethical standpoint on the matter, my current view is that it's largely a matter of intention (like most things really).  I hope that anyone viewing these latest glimpses of corporate life can appreciate that my motives are pretty benign.  The people depicted are, I think, suitably anonymous, and their activities - sufficiently mundane and non-incriminating, to negate any sense of genuinely sinister intrusion.  In addition, these are hardly the most technically adept photos ever captured - their murky, almost sub-aquatic flavour, making them pretty hard to interpret in any event.  Anyway, I'll happily leave the specific location of these shots unannounced, and assert that there is no deliberate intention to demean, deride or embarrass anyone here, on my part.

In reality, the stimulus for this little suite of images, was mostly to do with capturing that sense of melancholy, Hopperesque alienation, so characteristic of modern urban life - and an innocent curiosity about 'what those people actually do in there', that I often experience when passing nominally unremarkable workplaces.  I'll be honest - the specific details  of contemporary employment practices remain a considerable mystery to me, in many respects.  Above all, it's just that old flanneurist or quasi-Situationist fascination with 'the everyday' - I suppose.  That - and the visual appeal of deflected reflections and framing architectural geometry, of course.  

I suppose there's also the question of why the unaccustomed inclusion of the human element in many of my recent photographs should occur in such a distanced and detached manner.  I'll leave in-depth consideration of the potential psychological implications of that for another time...