Excavating Eutopia (Look 2011)

Excavating Utopia is a collaborative project for LOOK 2011 based on the life of an ordinary street ...Park Road ...but this Park Road is all over the country depending on where the participants are working and becomes an imaginary street populated by imaginary residents that have the same pressures and joys as 'real' people. When the work is completed it will bring together all the threads from all the Park Roads into a coherent project that reflects on the nature of life in the UK at this time of stress and change.
The work also questions the validity of photography in terms of seeing is believing and that all photography by it's very nature is a subjective truth (untruth?) but in this case any semblance of supposed truth is removed from the work in that what the viewer with unwittingly see is a total fabrication of places, people, histories and events.
My response to this has been to photograph the residents of Park Road. Presented as a photograph album, the viewer is forced into making assumptions that the people are related in some way; something that may or not be true. Collectively, these images represent a snapshot of 'ordinary' life in an 'ordinary' street in the UK. It is up to the viewer to decide what this tells us.