Yesterday I spent a few hours in the company of my...

Yesterday I spent a few hours in the company of my friend Peter Coles, photographer, writer and all round top chap. Inevitably we spent a good deal of time talking about photography and this led to a bit of an email exchange about the book he and his wife had bought me for Christmas (actually I think it was a belated birthday gift) and his photographs. He sent me a link to a blog and website and I was immediately drawn to his images of Paris.

I remembered seeing some photograhs years ago of items of rubbish washed up in the gutters (which are cleaned daily in Paris from some central source). If you’ve ever been to Paris you will have seen strange rolled up bits of carpet in the gutters (Caniveaux) which the street cleaners use to angle the water down a nearby drain. Occasionally, certain objects get stuck on their watery journey and these present the observant photographer (and Peter is nothing if not amazingly observant) with a fascinating subject. Rather than being dazzled by the phantasmagoria of the arcades, Peter has documented the more mundane but no less captivating details of Parisian life. Three other series of Parisian images (‘Paris Traces’) deal with the shoes that are left by concerned citizens for those without them, the graffiti carved into the silver birch trees on the banks of the Seine, and a wonderful sequence of litter bins (Poubelles) that were closed by the authorities in the wake of terrorist attacks and on top of which Parisians have deposited artfully arranged items of litter. As archaeologists know only too well, we are what we throw away.

Peter kindly sent me a few jpegs of the Caniveaux series which have not yet been published anywhere and he has allowed me to share them with you here. Please check out Peter’s websites and take a look at his other work. You might also want to check out the wonderful ‘Edgelands’ by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts.

Edgelands