Books - as well as virtual tours - are a great resource for me right now so I was so pleased to see Paul Treacy had created another wonderful handmade book of his life in south east London.
I've written about his work a couple of years ago when he published SE26. I suppose it's one of the benefits - for me at least - of this blog that I can take time travel back to my state of mind over the last ten years and in a way a long time before that too.
I was thinking then of my roots and that concept is very much back on my agenda, courtesy of our current hyperlocal lifestyles. I identify with London, of being a Londoner. Although I'm not quite sure what that means right now. Where I was born in an area of south east London - not central, not suburban - gave me an outsider's perspective of the city. Reinforced to a large degree by my parents' status and a big motivation behind my photography. I've since started to appreciate where I live now in west London over the last few months....again through the medium of photography.
The outsider-ness is still present (I blame reading French existentialism at an impressionable age) so maybe that's here for good now but to be honest I feel I need to dig a bit deeper, beyond my surface and that of the world around me. The New Europe project was a step in that direction.
I need to keep walking.
