Palimpsest is a portfolio and still-in-progress artist book of images taken between the summers of 2023 and 2024, predominently in London and the southeast of England.
In 1989, the political scientist Francis Fukuyama declared that humanity had reached the “End of History”. The Cold War was over. Western liberal democracy had prevailed. He lamented the loss of ideological struggle, and the looming monotony of this post-historic era. But there is another kind of End to History.
Our ecosystems are rocketing towards collapse. Our forests burn. Our oceans acidify. Extinctions happen daily, and our blood fills with plastic. If we do not act fast, there will be no one left to record us. Our history books will be left incomplete. We will be overwritten, just as we sought to overwrite the world.
My photographic work, in an ongoing project titled “Palimpsest” (2021-present), explores nature in this post-historic human landscape, and asks a simple question: What will our world look like when we are gone?
My undergraduate dissertation, “On Yearning” (2021), is foundational to this photographic practice. It examines a sort of wistful nostalgia for a future that cannot be. In life, we catch glimpses of worlds on our periphery—an open window seen from a moonlit street; or the fleeting tail of a lonely whale, just visible from shore; or the setting sun behind a low bank of clouds—and our hearts ache to see more, to climb through the window, to leap into the sea, to run towards the sunset. The Yearning is a glance from afar, a world imagined and desired but never experienced.
My images, like these glimpses, are a sort of synecdoche: from a single frame, a single point of punctum, they construct a world. I strive for effortless images. In “Beauty in Photography” (1981), Robert Adams writes that “only pictures that look as if they had been easily made can convincingly suggest that beauty is commonplace.” I seek simple images in order to strip them of their context, and to allow the viewer to peer at the world between them. They build on each other; their potency is their collective imagination.
All of my images are discoveries, spontaneous and unconstructed. I search for them on long walks; my creative practice is, essentially, walking. I explore landscapes outside of their time: off-season tourist towns, sun-bleached and empty; concrete coasts fortified long ago against war and erosion; miraculous life amidst the remnants of industry. My work contains no people.
Years ago, I thought I was capturing echoes of a time before history: primordial constellations in light leaking through curtains, ancient actors’ footprints in the dust of vacant stages. A world of myth, like a first coat of paint, glinting through chips and scratches. This, however, is backwards. I explore landscapes with a past, not because I want to photograph that past, but because they let us glimpse into the future of our troubled world—a future at once desolate, lonely, beautiful, and strangely prehistoric—and show us what the End of History really means.
