For a while now I have been fascinated with photographing hoardings of new housing developments as unique street subjects.
Within the unprecedented amount of construction taking place in London, they stand in the urban space like life-size brochures, interfaces between the existing city and the wishful projections of developers’ marketing targets.

These worlds within worlds wrap the boundaries of building sites with seductive promises. They range from lifestyle assemblages of image-bank shots, to architectural renderings with royalty-free characters inserted in CGI designed spaces, to completely synthetic images where even people are computer generated.

Sometimes I am told that there are hardly any people in my shots. Here they are: ghosts in reverse, occupying the spaces yet to be built, lived in, died in.

These ghost citizens seem to relax, get fitter, shop and lounge, living their endless leisurely private and public lives as replicants of people like us; however at close observation these impeccable lives may also reveal anxieties that have filtered through the carefully edited environments.

All unpredictable ‘moments’ that might constitute the traditional subjects of photography have been purged in these normalised and squarely targeted images of interior and exterior urban lives.

But once they become embedded in their physicality within the ‘real’ street with its dirt and its duration they turn into something else. The streets seem to ‘reclaim’ some of the matter edited out, resisting the manufactured pitch of these marketing ploys.

It is this unqualified, unrepressed matter lurking in the shots that attracted my attention and it is the subject of this project.