This digest revels in the in-between, the transitional, the presence of absence. My camera with its dials and knobs and sharp focus has taken me into the blur of things. It has taught me that because things can't be measured it doesn't mean that it isn't there. The spirit of things, the essence of our places is as real as my shutter button.
I feel a jolt, a sudden shift of perspective. The tension between the refined above and the stark reality beneath is palpable. Hidden in plain sight is a narrative on our own mortality – a memento mori.
Here’s my chance to have parity with the generations that might listen to the final note of Longplayer in 975 years’ time. Here’s my chance to look down upon a thousand-year thread of time and try to comprehend what this building means to me.
In recent times, I’ve noticed a shift in my emotions—a kind of angst driven by the current state of the world, followed by a re-purposing of how I want to navigate it.
Beneath its surface, the meadow seems to live and breath — buttercups, sorrel, long grass — all caught in the current, wriggling and swaying as if in conversation with the stream. I sit beside it and stay for a while.
And so it seems fitting—uncannily fitting—that the man standing in the rubble should bear the name he did. Piper. Pipe. Conduit.
I walk down through the nave, drawn towards a doorway that cradles a rarefied luminescence — a mingling of dappled colour from stained glass, the glint of refracted light on metal, and a hint of the golden radiance that spring has blessed us with this year.
If the Grand Tour were still a rite of passage, this would be one of its stopping places — visited not for splendour but for its pleasing dereliction.
With the full day ahead of me – and feeling like a lord and master over time – I visit all my usual haunts: breakfast at the Naked Man, a browse through the bookshop on the market square, coffee at the Folly on the hill.
I’ve photographed many projects where artists, artisans and conservators have helped restore—and sometimes transform—the memory of an age, an epithet, a story, a turning point, through a building, a memorial or a piece of art.