Photography News

Stalybridge, Cheshire / Greater Manchester 2014 - Photography by Stephen Riley
Street Scene Stalybridge
Elaborate fence creates a kind of sentinel for the street
Sometimes it’s hard to put your finger on what it is that makes you take a particular photograph. You start off with the view that a thing has a certain something about it, but what that is might not reveal itself for a while. Indeed, it might only be the act of taking it into the camera and seeing it in a different way which reveals that.
The obvious feature that caught the eye with this is the distortion: this elaborate piece of old ironwork has been forced back from the vertical, but why that matters is less clear. Perhaps curiosity plays a part: we do not know how that happened. Having been a resident of Stalybridge on and off for a very long time, my mind goes to what drunks might have got up to on a Saturday night: a bit of gratuitous vandalism. But it might not be that at all. Certainly, it would take some strength to manually bend such a hefty piece of metal, so maybe it was damaged by a vehicle or in the process of work being carried out on the building. We will never know, but the effect is of a strange, almost surreal, shape making its way into our presence and consciousness and demanding attention.
What seems most engaging is that the device, having a symmetrical quality and circles either side of that arrangement, has resonances of something human. Maybe we see eyes and a nose, or perhaps a cartoon character, like animated anthropomorphised scissors in an educational cartoon, or some household utility object that has come to life in Walt Disney's 'Fantasia'.
The obvious feature that caught the eye with this is the distortion: this elaborate piece of old ironwork has been forced back from the vertical, but why that matters is less clear. Perhaps curiosity plays a part: we do not know how that happened. Having been a resident of Stalybridge on and off for a very long time, my mind goes to what drunks might have got up to on a Saturday night: a bit of gratuitous vandalism. But it might not be that at all. Certainly, it would take some strength to manually bend such a hefty piece of metal, so maybe it was damaged by a vehicle or in the process of work being carried out on the building. We will never know, but the effect is of a strange, almost surreal, shape making its way into our presence and consciousness and demanding attention.
What seems most engaging is that the device, having a symmetrical quality and circles either side of that arrangement, has resonances of something human. Maybe we see eyes and a nose, or perhaps a cartoon character, like animated anthropomorphised scissors in an educational cartoon, or some household utility object that has come to life in Walt Disney's 'Fantasia'.