It’s time once again for Shadows and Reflections: the annual collection of postings in which our contributors and friends look back on the events that’ve shaped the past twelve months. Kicking off the season is Brian David Stevens:

This year I’ve been going through an old set of pictures in order to make a new book. The photographs that make up Doggerland were shot over ten years ago, a time of change and disruption for me and a time I wanted to fall in love with photography again. I purchased two new small cameras that would fit into my pocket and started to walk the streets, hunting photographs, exploring paths, hitting dead-ends.

The pictures were made in London and New York. I shot every day, I always had the camera with me, it became quite obsessional. Eventually both cameras started to break down and the photographs started to slow and after two years the project and the cameras both died and everything stopped.

The book Doggerland will be published by Another Place Press. You can pre-order it book here.

From the book intro by John FG Stead:

Waves crash.
LOVER OF STRANGERS
A path cuts through the worn grass.
I KNOW I HAVE LOST
Now the advertising posters dance, shimmer on glass, huge as the buildings.
EVERYTHING NOW PLEASE
…and we find a layering of screens, of silhouette that doesn’t quite make itself out; a cross now in a field.
GOLD IN MY HEAD
Jesus… A flag ; a knotted scarf ; a book (but framed, cased under glass)…
Symbols? We might reflect on that.

Simply? This is a complex joined-up narrative of elements perceived through glass – this is found images, but images all looked-for : sought, perceived even a little in advance, where the right picture is thus in itself its own reflection.
Something of all that is what you see with eyes half-silvered anyway – is no more than just that thing which we all call photography.
But this is something more than that.
For this is Doggerland.