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Exploring the notion of community in the Heygate Estate in Elephant and Castle in South London, an area where a massive urban regeneration programme will take place in the coming years, I decided to focus on what most impressed on me there: signs of social control. This project intends to criticise the overwhelming presence of such signs in the UK, and in London in particular, to mock the commercial and economic viability of the regeneration programme, and to challenge the assumption that photography is a medium best intended for recording the past instead of allowing for visualising a possible future. It consists of a series of 16 portraits taken on the Heygate Estate consistently showing existing signs of control, whether explicitly written or made up to streamline people’s movements, such as delimited pathways or fences, but also fake CCTV cameras, placed in the landscape as an allusion to a future when the rehabilitated Estate will be more carefully watched after. Additonally, I asked people who I met randomly, and who agreed to be photographed, to hold branded bags of famous High Street stores as an allusion to a future when chains of commercial outlets will have replaced the existing shopping centre, the nearby markets and smaller shops. |
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