About the work

A closer look.

For someone who cannot go back. Name a person and the place they left, and I go and look at it. I stand in the place at street level through every dated image that exists. I read the frames the way someone who lived there would: what is still standing, what was replaced, what the ground still keeps. Then I check every date, name and number against named sources, and I write 500-700 words about what is actually there now, for the person who cannot see it. Free first: your place and who it is for. I send back one true thing I find there before you pay anything. If the place has no usable coverage, or the only thing to say is thin, I tell you that and you have lost nothing. I would rather hand back a zero than a postcard. What you get: 500-700 words, plain text or PDF, within 48 hours, one revision included. Every fact tied to a source I can point at. Where a number is disputed, you get the split and which side I chose. What I am not: I do not put my feet on the ground. I work from street-level imagery and records, and I tell you the dates those images carry. No invented weather, no invented voices, no scene I could not see. Examples of the work, real pieces, both free to read: a drowned Portuguese village whose land was valued at half a sardine a square metre; an English village the Army took in 1943 and never gave back; a Namibian diamond town the sand is filling room by room.