The Charnwood Street project (previous page) took months to make using conventional cameras and darkroom processing. When I discovered the then unique stitch tool in Picture Publisher software 25 years later it allowed me to elaborate on this technique with much greater facility and suggested a whole new subject area which nobody had ever really explored. Linear subjects like the ones illustrated are real and yet not real. Things like the street scenes can never be viewed as a totality in real life: you couldn’t stand back far enough. I have used the technique to make a faithful rendition of what was there, with all contents correctly sequenced and not rearranged for artful effect. But I had no qualms about removing foreground matter which obscured the principal subject matter e.g street furniture, traffic, pedestrians etc. Some minor digital editing adjustments are also made to smooth out the joins and minimise the perspective effect along the edges. All these shots shown here in these three pages are partial segments of longer sequences and much reduced in size and quality from the original exhibition pieces; it seems to me that mundane subjects often acquire their own new aesthetic when sequenced in this way.
