In this story
Few architectural styles divide opinion like brutalism. To its critics, the great concrete buildings of the mid-twentieth century are grey, oppressive and cold — monuments to an idea of the future that never arrived. To its admirers, they are bold, honest and quietly beautiful, built with a confidence that later architecture has rarely matched.
I have always been somewhere in the middle. I grew up near a large concrete housing estate that was demolished when I was a teenager, and I remember being surprised by how much I missed it. This series began as an attempt to understand that feeling.
Raw concrete
The name brutalism is usually traced to the French phrase béton brut, meaning raw concrete — concrete left exposed rather than covered or painted, often still carrying the marks of the wooden boards used to shape it. Look closely at many of these buildings and you'll see the grain of long-vanished planks pressed into the surface, like fossils.
That texture is what drew me to photograph them on black-and-white film. Without colour to distract, the eye goes straight to surface and form: the repeating rhythm of windows, the deep shadows under balconies, the weathered streaks where rain has run down the same paths for half a century.
Geometry
Many of these buildings were designed around repetition: identical units stacked, rotated and multiplied. From a distance, that can feel monotonous. Up close, and with the right light, it becomes something closer to music — a pattern with variations, a theme returning in different keys.
I spent a lot of time looking for vantage points that would turn a building into a pure composition of lines and shadows. Stairwells were especially rewarding. So were the undersides of walkways, where the structure is laid bare and you can see exactly how the weight of the building is being carried down to the ground.
Concrete records everything — the weather, the years, and every hand that touched it.
People
Brutalist buildings are often photographed empty, which makes them look even more austere than they are. But most of the buildings in this series are still lived in, worked in or used every day. I wanted at least some of the photographs to show that.
A woman tending a balcony full of geraniums, fourteen floors up. Children cycling around the base of a car park. An elderly man reading a newspaper on a concrete bench he told me he had sat on every morning for thirty years. These figures are small in the frame, but they change the meaning of everything around them. The buildings stop being sculptures and become homes.
Disappearing buildings
Several of the buildings I photographed are now scheduled for demolition or major renovation. Some have already gone. This is not, in itself, necessarily a tragedy — many of these structures have real problems, from poor insulation to costly repairs, and the people who live in them deserve better conditions.
But it does give the series an unexpected urgency. In a few years, some of these photographs will be records of things that no longer exist. That was not my intention when I started, but it has become part of how I think about the work.
Walking the estates
Most of these photographs were made on long, slow walks through housing estates, civic centres and university campuses built between the 1950s and the 1970s. I rarely arrived with a plan. Instead, I would walk for several hours, looking for the moment when a building's geometry and the day's light lined up.
Overcast days were best. Direct sunlight creates hard, dramatic shadows that can make concrete look theatrical; soft, even light lets the texture and form speak for themselves. I came to love grey weather, which in this part of the world is fortunate.
Many residents stopped to ask what I was doing. Some were puzzled that anyone would want to photograph their building. Others were proud of it and told me stories about the views, the neighbours and the lifts that never worked. Several pointed me towards corners I would never have found on my own.
Printing
Every image in this series was printed by hand in the darkroom on fibre-based paper. Concrete is surprisingly difficult to print well. The tonal range is narrow — a great deal of mid-grey — and it is easy to end up with a flat, muddy print. Getting the textures to sing took a lot of test strips and some careful dodging and burning to lift the highlights and deepen the shadows.
What the buildings taught me
I started this series expecting to photograph architecture. I ended up photographing time: rain streaks, repairs, faded paint, plants growing from cracks, the slow accumulation of fifty years of ordinary life against hard, grey surfaces. Concrete, it turns out, is one of the most expressive materials there is. You just have to stand still long enough to let it speak.
Technical notes
- Camera: 6×7 medium-format film camera
- Lenses: standard and wide-angle
- Film: ISO 100 and 400 black-and-white
- Development: by hand, in a standard developer
- Prints: silver gelatin on fibre-based paper, toned for permanence
Prints
Five photographs from Concrete Poems are available as hand-printed silver gelatin editions of 10. Each is printed, signed and numbered in the studio. See Prints.