All Roads...

All Roads… is an ongoing street photography project documenting the city of Rome in the 21st century. 

I was born in the UK but have lived in Italy for most of my adult life. Rome has been my adopted home since 2000, so this is a project that has grown organically from my almost daily practice of shooting candid friezes or unstaged tableaux vivants on the streets of my local neighbourhood. I live in a busy central area, close to the Vatican, which is usually teeming with people – friends, Romans, countrymen, and of course, tourists.  The Covid pandemic necessarily interrupted this during periods of lockdown, and then changed the narrative of the streets, with sparsely populated street scenes, as things gradually opened up again. Recent work is catalogued separately in 20/20 Vision and Pandemic City. 

These photographs seek nothing more than to record moments of being – indeed, actually being there and noticing everything, really seeing the world around you, being awake to those chance occurrences, and finding the narrative thread in random moments, is the very essence of street photography. One might call this approach classic street photography, and while hardly revolutionary, I do believe that contemporary photographers can bring something new to this hybrid of social documentary and street photography, by incorporating the influences of our own experiences, geographical location, and unique personal sensibilities.

I am a walker not a stalker, so the photographs are dictated primarily by the situations I happen upon as I move rather than waiting in a specific spot for the decisive moment to come to me. I am not looking for the sensational, weird or comical; an intrinsic dramatic or compositional tension can often be found in images that might at first seem banal shots of everyday life. Every single moment is (in)decisive.

I began my creative life as a painter, but my street photography now is closer to the snapshot photographic aesthetic rather than pictorialism.