Andy Thorpe ARPS

I have a wide range of photographic interests, but I’m mostly drawn to urban and environmental subjects. The four projects summarised here use the contemporary and documentary approaches to photography in order to highlight and comment on such issues.

Furloughed: 13 things not used during the first month of the COVID-19 lockdown

The set is deliberately limited to 13 photos because being infected by the SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) virus can sadly prove to be very unlucky. Many people will have a similar list of items and of course the list is probably endless. Initially, the set wasn’t sequenced; the order now reflects what would have been the chronological use of the things over the course of a typical weekday. It starts with no longer having a reason to be awake at 6am. Was life best before March 23rd 2020?

Classic...or just an old car?

This project was designed primarily to be presented as a book because it mainly shows a series of contrasting diptychs, eg the car’s speedometer placed opposite a speed limit sign from a UK motorway. I concluded that for a number of financial, societal, health, practical and environmental reasons my old Golf GTI 16v, considered by many to be the holy grail of hot-hatches, is in fact just an old car. The new owner might well also be discovering this.

Car Fire

My commuting and leisure journeys by bicycle often yield an opportunity to take photos because it’s easy to stop to do so. This set resulted from passing the same place on successive days and capturing the changes in the scene. Initially just a photo of a wrecked car, the scene seemed to become a metaphor for the effects that cars are having on the environment, ie although there is some attempt to clean-up, the scars exist and there’s a question over environmental recovery.

How do they sleep? A spectrum of mattress disposal options

This project provides a snapshot of how mattresses have been illegally disposed of in a small part of the West Midlands; many people who live elsewhere will probably recognise the examples included. The photobook includes a scoring scheme to rank the disposal methods chosen. This helps to sequence the book, which starts at bad and ends at worse. Examples of good behaviour have also been included in the project.

Hopefully to be finished soon are other projects involving graffiti, untaxed vehicles, duplicate warning signs and a second book about discarded mattresses. These projects will eventually (!) find their way to my website www.peopleplacesthingsphoto.com and probably photobooks.