Steven Smithwhite

The artist: My photography is rooted in the city where I live – Glasgow. I work primarily in black and white, producing formal compositions that draw attention to the forms and textures of concrete, stone, wood, plastic, brick, glass, metal, and organic matter (including, occasionally, people, for whose benefit these materials are arranged). I’m drawn to lesser-seen parts of the city and to a graphic simplicity in composition. For these reasons, I often work in peripheral areas: suburban or industrial zones.

While each photograph presents a real place and real objects, captured at fixed points in their inevitable decay, my work is not documentary. The Glasgow in these images is a fiction: I built it; I am building it. It is not meant to be recognisable as the same city you may have visited or lived in. It is dissociated from that one – and more still, more austere, more lonely.