“One terrible truth about photographs is that they can only ever show us what happened, never what is happening or will happen. They are always about something that is gone, and so are in league with death.”
David Levi Strauss, from Between the Eyes

This series of images explore aspects of everyday items of clothing that find them, somehow or another, being part of the inter-tidal region of the River Thames as it flows through central London.

How have these items come to be here? What story do they tell of past experience? Have they been thrown away unwanted after a useful life? Maybe they have been lost inadvertently? Or maybe they have been discarded after a criminal event? The scenarios are legion.

Like many things in life the truth may never be known but here the viewer is invited to construct their own interpretation of the history of these artefacts.

At the same time we may also ponder the metaphorical aspect of their condition in that they occupy a spatial environment that straddles two worlds – a kind of limbo between a (useful) life and a (useless) death. They are imbued with a melancholic decay as they are slowly transformed by continuous submersion and exposure achieving an indeterminate state.

Tonally the images shift from light to dark – echoing the transition of these relics from one state to another, from existence to non-existence.

“We photographers deal in things that are continuously vanishing, and when they have vanished, there is no contrivance on earth that can make them come back again.”
Henri Cartier-Bresson, from The Decisive Moment