City surfaces

City Surfaces is an urban research and photography project focused on city walls and surfaces as archives of urban cultures.

The City Surfaces website and corresponding Instagram page showcase the multiple ways in which cities reveal themselves through their public surfaces – and how urban spaces are managed, claimed and contested at surface level.

To begin with, I will show you how I see (seeing is a way of thinking, photography is a way of knowing). I am publishing as close as I can to one wall a day – which should keep me going for years, especially at the rate that I keep photographing the cities I encounter. I recently moved from London to Melbourne so you might notice a bias towards these two cities.

As the project grows, I am planning to develop a section of scholarly references for surface studies, publish and expand an existing sketch for interviewing a wall, and feature work by other photographers, scholars, artists and practitioners working with surfaces (get in touch if that’s you and we haven’t spoken yet).