On Standby

In the UK, the inefficient and overuse of lighting around towns, cities and private property, on average, causes an extra 645,000 tonnes of CO2 to be released into the atmosphere each year. This project aims to emphasize the importance of this issue and the lack of incentive for councils and private individuals to reduce the use of inefficient lighting and curb our fossil fuel reliance.

On Standby is designed to highlight the lack of human presence within these scenes despite them being illuminated, but also implies a human presence conceptually via the depiction of artificial structures, which are in turn made redundant by our concept of sleep, meaning these scenes remain on standby; waiting for the intermittent passer-by to pass through within seconds, blindly consuming energy.

Every image created for this project was shot on a Mamiya RB67, once the film was spent, the negatives were processed and then scanned, to then edit the images digitally.

This project was initially intended to be a one-off for University, though it’s safe to say that this project is still on-going as this sentiment is continued in my present-day works & photoblog.