Web Page - Photographs - The Slow Movement

This is the link to my website http://www3.clikpic.com/lesleypeat/

I've been undertaking two series of photographs.  One is called Men at Work - usually taken on my travels - in order Barcelona, York and Fez in Morocco:

The other is of empty small shops - this one is in Ripon, Yorkshire.

The other thing that I've been doing is looking at the history of Clemens Street in Leamington Spa, researching via the internet and the L/Spa public library.

Interested in the Slow Movement http://www.slowmovement.com/ and a connection to Place.  Also General (ie supermarkets and mass production) vs Handmade.  From the Slow Movement website:

"One of the tenets of the Slow Movement is to preserve cultural heritage. This is especially clear in the slow food movement where one of the emphasises is on traditional ways of preparation, serving and consumption of traditional foods, using traditional recipes. The emphasis on cultural heritage is no less important in other areas of the slow movement where we make a deep connection to place, people, and culture.

"Cultural heritage refers not only to the physical qualities and attributes (both natural and human-made) of places but also to their historic, or social value for past, present or future generations. These qualities and attributes include such intangible qualities as people’s associations with, or feelings for a place."

Current Work

I've just been reading Geoff Dyer's The Ongoing Moment where he says, talking about Walker Evan's book American Photographs (1938) that it aims to "echo the possibilities of simultaneity and random juxtaposition afforded by a pile of photographs.  You rummage in the box.  You pick a photograph and then another one and the way they are combined makes you view each of them in a different way".  This is the aim behind the work I am currently doing ....

These are more images from the Jewellery Quarter:

Walter Benjamin (quoted in Psychogeography) says in A Berlin Chronicle when talking about being a flaneur "Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal.  It requires ignorance - nothing more.  But to lose oneself in a city - as one loses oneself in a forest - that calls for quite a different schooling.  Then signboards and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet". 

My friends are now getting used to my search for different types of wooden blocks - building bricks etc.