Crawley

Crawley is a photographic ode to the town in which I grew up. It started out as my postgraduate project at Goldsmiths College in 1989 and was then developed for various exhibition contexts. It’s an important work for me, a kind of love letter, but also it was very much a way of trying to understand the place and its cultural context. Presented here are a selection of images, the image-text print version and the audio-visual version. 'Though over forty years old [1990], Crawley is, and will always remain a New Town. The spectre of the New Town has become ingrained in the popular imagination of post-war Britain. Widely seen as a particular kind of utopian town planning gone wrong, New Towns are seemingly places without identity that have come to signify a unique form of highly rational but soulless urban space. For Sam Appleby the nature of this kind of space is more complex and, in turn, its representation is more problematic. In fact his approach in this work is not to 'represent' Crawley as such, certainly not in any conventional social documentary sense, but to simulate 'the elusiveness of space in general'. The images were made through long exposures of up to four minutes, compressing time but elaborating and energising space. The environment is deliberately transformed from something stable and utilitarian into something shifting, alive with immanent change - a highly charged electric drama, directed by the surveillant glare of artificial light. The accompanying texts were drawn from a variety of sources: from the English anti-urban writings of the last century and from the Garden City movement which they spawned; from the British New Town movement and its ideals of design and community; from cultural theory and the discourses of space and geography; and from the popular press. They are intended as counterpoints to the pictures, suggesting meanings but not unravelling the wider cultural and political questions that lie behind the gleaming surface of the image.' David Chandler, The Photographers' Gallery, 1990