Albion Street, Brighton, 2017: English Urban Landscape Photography

This research project explores the possibility of developing an aesthetics of belonging and estrangement connected to ideas and images of place. Considered complex and interwoven, these ideas and images are approached through the realisation of a body of visual artwork in the form of urban landscape pictures including text. The pictures are realised in the photographic medium through a topographic approach as detailed, descriptive artefacts with a mixture of residential and cultural institutional buildings as subjects. Text is featured in the pictures as the word ‘Albion’ - the oldest of names for England.

Building upon longstanding practice-based research, these pictures add to and build upon projects across Fergus Heron’s wider work including Charles Church Houses (1996-2007 and 2009-14) and A View of London (2014) addressing questions of place in which notions of the urban, rural, modern and traditional are considered as contingent points within a spectrum of interrelated ideas rather than binary opposites. This project is underpinned by theories of photography and the uncanny, informed by art historical concepts of landscape and national identity; the output imaginatively positions viewers in and out of place at the same time, revealing hidden political significance in immediate surroundings.