Lockdown forced my urban landscape practice into the realms of post-photography. In this project I went back through my old photographs of buildings and architecture, reflecting on them and the photograph itself as a source of both evidence and creativity. Everything is Real presents a series of architectural Rorschach tests, inspired by the artist’s three year old daughter Zoë, who defiantly proclaims “everything is real!” whenever her fantasies are challenged. Despite alluding to something more fantastical – spaceships, monsters, surreal objects from another world – everything about each photograph is actually real, an index of a real structure - the only intervention being a mirror, which is another illusory technology we routinely rely on to tell us the truth. The viewer is tricked by reflective symmetry into seeing something which is not present, a psychological phenomenon known as pareidolia. Does what we see in these meaningless forms have something to tell us about ourselves? All photographs have this latent ability, here rendered obvious through the simplest of manipulations.

In this series, the artist revisits his own photography of the city, trying to see it afresh, as if through the eyes of a child. “Reality” is a trick of perception and there are other ways of seeing it that we have forgotten. Photography should be about seeing through another set of eyes, perceiving banal and everyday things and spaces in new ways. As a manifesto this challenges the objectivity and authoritative “truth claim” of photography, something which has been shown as both false and politically problematic by key theorists such as John Tagg. At a time when reality itself seems to be bending out of recognition, it might be comforting to consider that how we look at things, has a profound ability to alter what we see – but equally, we might be troubled by how little we can trust the image as evidence.

Part of this series was published as photo essay in Herri journal in 2020.

The images have also been used by the Urban Exploration collective as album artwork on several releases.