LEER EN CASTELLANO ︎︎︎

This small collection of photographs, taken between two and three in the morning in the streets and roads of Peckham, records the thirty-minute walk from my place of work at the time and my first room in London. The neighbourhood had a bad reputation, having been one of the epicentres of the 2011 riots, whose aftermath still felt very present.

I worked a minimum-wage job in a nearby pub: a place favoured by Goldsmiths students and hipsters who were beginning to move into the area. Traditionally working-class Peckham had a rich migrant community, mostly Nigerian, and the saying went that the neighbourhood was "black by day and white by night". The arrival of late-night venues, cafés and small restaurants was already heralding the beginnings of gentrification.

When I used to finish my shift, a little after closing, the streets were almost empty, but for the usual group smoking outside the pool club that, unlicensed, stayed open until dawn. Or busker Paul who bummed tobacco off me and played guitar up and down Rye Lane for a few coins a night. There were the iPhone thieves, too, stalking the last few stragglers outside the new (but retro) arcade.

I had no great ambitions and took pictures for the simple pleasure of it, never more than one or two shots a night. Many of them I later discarded, perhaps because I was feeling out of place myself at that time, suspended between the white nights and the black days, not really belonging to either. Just a white guy and his camera... who, every night, for an instant, claimed the place for himself.

Over time, I began working on the series about the City, put these photographs away, didn't think about them again. Years later, returning to Peckham to work on the new series, the images resurfaced as the trace of a city, and of a time, that has already disappeared.