"Even scratched to death a single rectangle of 35mm saves the honour of all of the real" – J.L. Godard
The City of London provides a hermetic boundary; a respiratory heart concentrated with predatory intensity. This elite enclosure breathes, gestation meeting abortion at closing bell. The City operates through rhythmic evacuation rather than continuous dwelling; the formation of its solidity measured not in permanent residents but in the violence of daily metabolic flows. This is not neutral urban space, rather a hunting ground - predatory financial practices concentrated in ritualistic form.
My method uses infrared to document the City’s daily evacuation - the moment of maximum metabolic intensity as workers flood toward exits. The infrared filter, isolating heat signatures by blocking visible light spectrum, necessitates significantly longer exposure times. This creates a structural impossibility: the concentration of bodies demanding capture requires extended exposures that transform moving humans into blur and erasure. The camera’s capacity to see heat becomes inversely proportional to its ability to render bodies clearly. However blurred, Multiplicitous in exposure and heavy in grain and noise. The existence of the photos in turn only proves the system’s resistance to being seen clearly. But “even scratched to death,” the captured reality testifies to the violence that sustains us.
My recordings perform a purposeful refusal of pristine representation, resisting systems that demand visual clarity while operating through diagrammatic abstraction. Financial markets render volatility as stable notation; movement plotted onto fixed Cartesian grids, encoded interfaces that flatten metabolic violence into calculable information. My apparatus inverts this logic: instead of plotting volatility upon stable axes, volatility itself destabilizes the photographic process. The reticle device functions as targeting reticle, its engineered point positioned at frame centre. Through an initial traversal and recording, this needle’s drift - tremor of hand, shift in focus, rhythm of breathing - becomes inflected in the captured images. These bodily discrepancies establish a calibration index by attesting to instability rather than stability, the photographer’s embodied response to predatory intensity becoming the measurement standard itself.
The second image set emerges through black cloth punctured throughout the evacuation period, creating temporal patterning through void’s surface. This manual slit-scan operation concentrates exposure at metabolic peaks rather than distributing time evenly - light reaches the sensor only through punctures positioned and timed according to rush hour intensity. The resulting images encode this temporal violence: punctured apertures stitched into a tapestry emboldened by the collective bodies it captures. The representation becomes as volatile as what it documents, refusing the stabilising flattening that surveillance feeds and market graphs perform to protect capital from clear detection.
This refusal is the critique. The Ring of Steel’s surveillance infrastructure produces forensic stability - traceable bodies, archivable data, evidence that can be processed by systems demanding clarity. My reconfigured apparatus (infrared modified, drift-calibrated, manually punctured) targets this representational stability itself. The reticle makes the violence explicit: taking aim at the interface logic that allows predatory systems to appear manageable, controlled, readable. By producing images that embody rather than contain volatility, the work reveals that any honest documentation of financial predation must resist the very technologies designed to make such systems legible and therefore governable.
